How to actually use your index on exam day

The most common index problem we see is not a bad index. It is a good index the candidate has never used against a clock.

They arrive with something thorough and well organised, and the first time they try to find something in it under time pressure is on exam day, when they discover that the way they think about the material while calm is not the way they think about it at minute 200.

Both papers are open book, print materials only, no digital access. So your index is not a study artefact. It is equipment, and equipment gets practised with.

Practise finding, not reading

Set aside an afternoon and do lookups. Not questions, lookups.

Have someone pull forty specific points from across the materials and give them to you one at a time, in the words a question would use rather than the words your index uses. Time each one. Write down the ones that took more than a minute.

That list is the most useful study document you will produce, because every entry on it is a lookup that would have cost you a question. Fix those entries, then run it again a week later.

Almost everyone is surprised by this exercise. Not by how slow they are overall, but by which specific things they cannot find.

Index the word in the question, not the term of art

Under pressure you search for the word in front of you, not the correct name for the concept.

A fact pattern will say a client wants to keep the house. It will not say the phrase your notes filed that under. If your index only carries the term of art, you have to translate before you can search, and translating is exactly the step that fails when you are tired.

So add the plain words. Cross-reference generously in the direction of how a question talks rather than how a textbook does.

Land on a page, not a chapter

An entry that gets you to a fifteen-page chapter has done about a third of the job. You still have to find the paragraph, and page-flipping under time pressure is where the minutes go.

If you bought your index rather than building one, this is still work you can do: as you read, add page-level entries for the things you personally keep having to look up. Nobody else's index knows what you find slippery.

Tab it, but tab it sparingly

Tabs are a fast index for the level above the index. They work because they are visible and few.

Thirty tabs is a navigation system. Ninety tabs is a wall of colour you have to read one at a time, which is slower than the index you already have. Tab the top-level divisions and the two or three things you know you will hit repeatedly, and stop.

The rule that saves the most marks

Decide in advance how long a lookup gets. Forty-five seconds, sixty, whatever you pick. When it runs out, choose the best option available to you, flag it, and move.

Almost nobody does this naturally, because when you cannot find something you know is in there, the instinct is to keep looking. That instinct will quietly eat your last hour.

The arithmetic is unforgiving. There is no penalty for a wrong answer, so an unanswered question and a wrong one are worth exactly the same. A four-minute hunt that ends in the right answer earns one point and costs you the two or three questions you did not reach. A twenty-second guess earns you a one-in-four chance and keeps them.

If you have time at the end, come back to what you flagged. You usually will, if you have been disciplined about this and not otherwise.

Practise on paper

There is no search box on exam day. If your preparation has happened mostly on a laptop, your finding skills have been quietly outsourced to Ctrl-F, and you will not notice until it is gone.

Do at least some of your practice questions with only the physical materials in front of you, exactly as they will be on the day.

The short version

• An index you have not used under time pressure is a document, not a tool.
• Practise lookups against a clock and fix the slow ones.
• Index the words a question uses, not the term of art.
• Get entries to a page, not a chapter, especially for things you personally find slippery.
• Tab the top level and stop. Ninety tabs is not a system.
• Time-box every lookup, then guess, flag and move. This saves more marks than any other single habit.
• Practise on paper, because Ctrl-F will not be there.

Related: open book doesn't mean easy.