This year, by my very own self, I have managed to break two of the corner-stone rules of exam technique (as defined in the booklet entitled "The Baird Exam Technique" page 24).

1) Never turn up late to an exam
2) Never leave early

Now these may seem rediculous at first glance, but with a small amount of simple arithmatic, it is apparent just how foundational they are. First, add up all the time spent in lectures/labs/tutorials/study/reviewing/discussion/etc- (in minutes), then divide that amount by the number of minutes the exam is times the proportion of total marks that exam is worth to the final grade. This is a numerary measure of the value of each minute in the exam to you.

Example- Say, you have 4 lectures a week, for 1 hour each, one lab/tutorial for 4 hours. And the exam (of 3 hour duration) is worth 70% of the final grade. That adds up to:

(4 + 4) x 1 x 60 x 12 (weeks) = 5760 minutes of work

5760 / ( 0.7 x 3 x 60) = 45.71 minutes

Assumptions: - You go to all labs/tuts/lectures
- You do more than sleep at said labs/tuts/lectures (otherwise actually being there is irrellevant)
- You do no study
- You show up to your exam
- You are actually doing the paper
- You havent already failed by not doing the internal assessment component and thus not achieving approval to sit heretofore mentioned examination
- It is not an English/History/Art/(insert name of bollocks subject) paper, in which case, your toils are no more than dust in the wind anyway
- You do not intend to get caught cheating during the last minute of the examination
- You do not have factual and verifyable evidence that the world will end before exams are marked
- You have arms and hands (or feet mayhaps) with which to wield an implement of writinghood, thereby scoring marks deep into the examination paper of the paper being examined allowing for markers without an immaculate telepathic link to students to mark the examination paper
- You never mention 'sausage' 'bread-roll' or any one of a number of naughty and innuendo-like words with the intention of biasing the marker completely against you.


If all these hold up, you can now see, that each minute is very precious, during exam time.