How many minutes per question, and what to do when you fall behind

160 questions in 4 hours and 30 minutes is about one minute forty per question, and knowing that number does almost nothing for you.

What you actually need, at minute 137 with a fact pattern you have read twice and not understood, is the answer to a different question: am I behind? Working that out in your head, mid-exam, while already flustered, is not a calculation anyone does well.

So use a pacer.

Open the pacer and time chart, free, and print it. Enter your own timing if the Law Society has granted you accommodations and it rebuilds the whole chart around it.

How it works

It is one page with two tables, and you keep it on the desk.

The first table has a countdown on the left, matching the exam clock as it runs down through the 4.5 hours, and on the right the question number you should be on at that moment. Glance across, compare it to the question you are actually on, and you have your answer in about two seconds.

The second table is the same thing for a clock that counts up from 0:00:00 rather than down. We have never seen a sitting run that way, but the whole point of a pacer is to remove one thing you have to think about, and "which way is this clock running" would be a poor thing to be working out in the first minute. Two tables costs nothing and covers both.

How to actually use it

Check it rarely. Every ten or fifteen questions, or at the section breaks. A pacer you consult constantly becomes a source of anxiety rather than a cure for it, and the time you spend checking is time you are not answering.

Bring it into practice. Use it on your full-length mocks so that glancing at it is automatic and so you learn what your own drift looks like. Most candidates have a consistent pattern, and you want to know yours before it matters.

Treat it as information, not judgement. Being eight questions behind at the halfway point is a fact about your pace, and facts are actionable. It is not a verdict on your preparation, and candidates who read it that way lose more time to the spiral than they ever lost to the deficit.

What to do when you are behind

You will be, at some point. The plan matters more than the panic.

Do not try to make it up all at once. Rushing the next fifteen questions to recover eight is how a small time problem becomes a marks problem. Recover gradually, over a section, not immediately.

Cut lookups first, not reading. The fastest saving available to you is time spent hunting in your materials, not time spent understanding the question. Tighten your lookup time-box and take fewer of them.

Answer everything you skip. There is no penalty for a wrong answer, so a flagged guess is strictly better than a blank you intend to return to. Intending to return to it is exactly what you will not have time for.

If you are badly behind late on, triage. With twenty minutes and thirty questions left, the highest-value thing you can do is answer all thirty quickly rather than carefully answer eleven and leave nineteen blank. One point each, remember, and the questions do not get harder at the end.

The one habit worth building

Never leave a question without an answer selected, even when you intend to come back. Flag it, pick something, move.

It costs a second and a half. It means that if you run out of clock, run out of concentration, or simply misjudge the last section, you are not handing back blanks. Candidates who do this are almost never the ones who finish a paper with unanswered questions, and unanswered questions are the most avoidable way to lose marks on this exam.

The short version

• About one minute forty per question, but the useful question is "am I behind right now".
• The pacer answers that at a glance. Left column is the clock, right column is the question you should be on.
• The second table covers a clock counting up instead of down.
• Check it every ten or fifteen questions, not constantly.
• Practise with it so it is automatic and so you learn your own drift.
• When behind: recover gradually, cut lookups before comprehension, and never leave a blank.