When I was doing my school exams, my father gave me some advice based on his own experience. He had studied dual honours in maths and physics at university, and had gone on to complete a PhD in mathematics – proof enough for me that he was pretty clever and knowledgeable about maths! Yet he was still irritated that when he took his finals for his bachelor’s degree, he didn’t get the top grade (a “First Class Degree”); his exam results had only merited an “Upper-Second”. Meanwhile, a classmate he regarded as a lesser mathematician had been awarded a “First”.
Well, that might be a bit conceited, but his reasoning was important: whereas he had completed every problem he attempted (and had thus run out of time before completing the paper), his rival for the top spot had started every question but left some unfinished. So, he explained, the best scores in exams are got by people with ruthless time management, not by perfectionists.
The IGCSE GP paper leaves the big-scoring questions until the end, and as a GP teacher, I have sadly marked many papers which show that the student spent too much time on the earlier questions, leaving later questions to suffer.
Fortunately, the exam stays much the same in structure each time, so it is possible to make a spreadsheet like this to map out a pacing plan.
One way to estimate how much time to spend on a question is the number of marks available. Of course, some marks might be quicker to get than others, but I think it’s fair to say that if we get to the last two questions without leaving their fair share of time, we’re likely to leave a lot of marks unclaimed.
Have an extra ten minutes!
In the 2025 syllabus update we’ve been given ten minutes’ more time (hooray!). There used to be 70 marks available in a 75-minute exam, so allowing 5 minutes to read the Insert Booklet before we began, it was all very neat: 70 minutes for 70 marks = one minute per mark.
Now, however, there are 85 minutes for the same 70 marks. How should we spend that extra ten minutes?
We’ve mocked up two plans for you. Either stick with one minute per mark and aim to use the extra ten minutes at the end wherever needed (let’s be frank, that’s probably going to be used on Q3 and Q4!) or you can change the time factor to 8/7 minutes to apportion the extra time to all the questions. In practice, after rounding the minutes, the small questions stay the same, the 8-mark questions get an extra minute, and Q3 and Q4 get most of the extra time, so it works out much the same. Here’s that plan, with a bit of tweaking to handle the rounding:
You can use the spreadsheet to give you a handy timetable based on the start time.
After you open the spreadsheet, choose “make a copy” from the File menu to create a version you can edit. Overwrite the start time, and the times you need to move onto each question will be calculated automatically.
If you qualify for extra time, you can change the “Time Factor”. For example, if you set it to 1.25 each question gets 25% more time.
If you practise with this tool, you should be able to enter the final exam much more confident in your pacing.