Some questions don't count. Stop trying to guess which

Buried in the Law Society's own materials is a fact most candidates either never learn or learn and obsess over: a small number of questions on each paper are unscored. They are experimental items being tested for future sittings. You cannot tell which ones they are, they do not count for or against you, and every sitting has them.

Candidates react to this fact in two ways, and one of them is expensive.

The expensive reaction

Midway through the paper you hit a question that seems strange. Off-topic, oddly worded, harder than everything around it. The thought arrives: this must be one of the experimental ones. And with that thought comes permission to shrug it off, answer carelessly, and move on.

Here is the problem with that licence: you have no idea. A question can feel strange because it is experimental, or because it is a perfectly scored question testing a corner of the materials you skimmed, or because you are tired and it is question 130. Candidates are poor judges of their own strange-question detector at the best of times, and minute 200 of an exam is not the best of times. Every time you write a question off as "probably experimental", you are gambling a real mark on a hunch about test construction.

The sane reaction

Treat every question as if it counts, because you can never act usefully on the possibility that it does not. This is one of those pleasant cases where the right strategy is also the simplest one: the existence of experimental items should change your behaviour by exactly nothing during the exam.

Where the fact does earn its keep is afterwards, psychologically. If you walk out remembering one bizarre question that seemed to belong to a different exam, you now have a perfectly good explanation that is not "I missed something everyone else understood". Let it be that, a comfort for the drive home, and nothing more.

The general principle underneath is worth keeping for the whole paper: on exam day, you play every question in front of you, at full effort, and let the scoring take care of itself. Strategy lives in preparation and pacing. It does not live in trying to out-think the people who assembled the paper.