Testing accommodations: preparing when your conditions are different

If the Law Society has granted you testing accommodations, practise under them. Not under the standard conditions, and not under a rough approximation.

This sounds obvious and it is very commonly got wrong, usually by candidates being conscientious. They practise on the standard 4.5-hour clock on the theory that training harder than the event is safer. For pacing, it is not.

Why practising on the wrong clock misleads you

Everything you learn about your own pacing is relative to the clock you learned it on.

If you have been granted additional time, your practice on a standard clock teaches you a rhythm you will not use: how fast to read, when to abandon a lookup, how many questions to have finished by the halfway point. On the day, all of those instincts are calibrated to the wrong length. Some candidates then rush through an exam they had time to do properly, which is a strange way to lose marks you were given the time to keep. Our exam pacer takes your granted time and rebuilds the chart around it, so the rhythm you practise is the one you will actually sit.

It also gives you a false picture of your own accuracy. A score produced under time pressure you will not face tells you less about your readiness than a score produced under your actual conditions.

The same goes the other way for accommodations that are not about time. If you will use particular software, a separate room, or scheduled breaks, the closer your practice is to that, the less of exam day is new.

What to do about it with us

Contact us after you buy and before you start, and we will set your account up to match. Our mock exams run on a server-kept clock, so the timer can be adjusted to whatever you have been granted.

Two things worth saying plainly, because candidates ask both and often hesitate to:

• We do not need documentation. If you tell us what you have been granted, we will match it. We are a practice platform, not an adjudicator, and asking you to prove your entitlement to us a second time would be both pointless and unpleasant.
• There is no extra charge. Same product, same price.

Just tell us before you start an exam rather than partway through, because the timer on an attempt that is already running is not something we can change without affecting the attempt itself.

What to keep the same

Adjust the clock and the conditions. Do not adjust anything else.

Sit the full paper, in one go, at the time of day you will actually write. If you have been granted a longer session, that is a longer endurance event, not a gentler one, and it deserves more attention to stamina rather than less. Building up to it is worth doing deliberately: see training for a long paper.

If your accommodations are still being decided

Accommodation requests go to the Law Society, and their process and deadlines are theirs rather than ours. Check their current requirements directly, and start early, because the timelines are earlier than most candidates expect.

In the meantime, practise on the standard clock and keep your own timing data. If your accommodations come through later, the comparison between the two is genuinely useful information about where the time pressure was actually costing you.

The short version

• Practise under the conditions you will write under, not the standard ones.
• Practising on a shorter clock than you will have teaches you a rhythm you will not use.
• Tell us after purchase and before you start, and we will match your timer. No documentation, no extra charge.
• Keep everything else realistic: full paper, one sitting, the hour you will write.
• Accommodation requests go to the Law Society, and their deadlines come earlier than people expect.

More in our FAQ.