Time Management For Assessments

Start Early = Win Big

We gave you the ultimate top in the last section on diaries. If you look back, we gave you the idea of entering a weekly countdown to your assignment due date in your diary. Start your assignments early and do a small amount each day. This day you are allocating small amounts of time over a longer period.

• Here are some quick time management tips for assignments:
  • Answer a part of each question and move on but then come back to it later. This way, if you hand in an unfinished assignment you have at least covered all the areas.
  • Start your assignment as soon as you can. Stay in the high priority not time critical quadrant.
  • Ask friends how they answered questions. This can save you a lot of time.
  • Do the easy questions first and don't get caught up spending huge amounts of time on the hard questions.
  • Do a really quick draft first. You can always fall back on that if you run out of time.

Time management for tests and exams

Time management is important in an exam because you have a lot to do and only a short time to do it. The idea of time management in exams is to look at the weighting of marks. For example, if an exam has 120 marks in total and goes for 1 hour, this means that you are supposed to gain roughly 2 marks a minute or 120 marks divided by 60 minutes. When you look at a question you should see how many marks are attached to it to work out how long to spend on it. If a short answer question is worth 12 marks you should spend 6 minutes on it i.e. 12 marks divided by 2 marks per minute equals 6 minutes, then move on. You should move on even if you haven't finished answering the question. The premise that is being used here is that if you run out of time in an exam you will get more marks for starting an essay than you will for finishing it. It is much easier to earn the first 50% for a test or exam answer than it is to earn the second 50%. You will get more marks for having 4 half finished essays than you will for 2 fully finished essays.

Activity

Look at all the assignments you have due. What can you get started on?