Five sections of 36 questions with about 42 minutes each works out at roughly 70 seconds per question — reading the stem, considering four options, committing. That is not generous, and it is not brutal either. The candidates who run out of time almost never do so evenly; they lose several minutes on three or four questions and then rush thirty.
The failure is concentrated, not spread
One question you refuse to let go of can eat four minutes. Do that three times and you have lost a quarter of the section, which you then repay by rushing questions you could have answered correctly. The net effect of fighting for one difficult mark is often losing two easy ones.
The expensive mistake is not being slow. It is being unwilling to abandon.
A rhythm worth rehearsing
- Read the last line of the stem first if the stem is long. It tells you what is actually being asked, and it changes how you read the rest.
- Commit or abandon within about ninety seconds. Not a hard rule, a habit. If nothing has resolved by then, it probably will not.
- Abandon by answering. Given the marking scheme, leave your best guess rather than a blank — you cannot come back to it.
- Check the clock at question 12 and 24. Two checks per section. More than that is a distraction; fewer and you discover the problem too late to fix it.
Why untimed practice builds the wrong instincts
Practising without a clock teaches you to pursue every question until it yields, because there is no cost to doing so. That is a good way to learn and a bad way to sit an exam, and the habit does not switch off just because the circumstances changed. If all your practice has been untimed, exam day is the first time you will attempt a skill you have never rehearsed.
Where the time actually goes
Timed practice usually reveals the same distribution: most questions take well under 70 seconds, and a small number take three or four minutes. The average is fine; the tail is what causes the problem. Fixing pacing is almost entirely about the tail, not about reading faster.
The ninety-second rule
A habit rather than a hard limit: if a question has not resolved in about ninety seconds, it probably will not. Commit to your best option and move. The mark you might have earned by persisting is worth less than the two or three you will lose at the end of the section by rushing.
This is harder than it sounds, because abandoning feels like giving up on a mark you can almost see. That feeling is exactly what the rule exists to override.
Where the sag happens
Concentration is not flat across 42 minutes, and most people have a predictable dip — often around question 20 to 25, when the initial focus has gone and the end is not yet in sight. Knowing your own dip means you can anticipate it rather than discovering it, and a deliberate five-second reset at that point is cheap insurance.
Pacing failures are almost never caused by reading slowly. They are caused by refusing to abandon three questions.
Practise the unit you will sit
Sets of 36, timed, mixed across subjects. It is less pleasant than open-ended practice and it is the only way to find out where your pacing actually breaks — which for most people is somewhere in the middle, when a run of hard questions arrives and the plan quietly gets abandoned.