How do I manage my time on test day?

In a previous blog post, we considered whether the Ontario bar exam should be considered “hard”. We ultimately concluded that, while the test isn’t hard, it isn’t easy either. In other words, you need to (1) study and (2) practice with challenging and updated practice exams if you want to succeed. This shouldn’t really be surprising, but sometimes it needs to be said aloud.

As mentioned in our last blog post, one of the biggest issues that licensing candidates struggle with on test day is timing. When you sit down to write the actual tests, you’re going to have 4 hours and 30 minutes to answer 160 multiple choice questions. However, 30 minutes is allotted for lunch/break, and so you’re really only going to have 4 hours to answer 160 questions. This means that, on average, you can dedicate 1 minute and 33 seconds to each question. While this may seem like a fair amount of time in the abstract, when you sit down to write the actual exam, you’ll quickly find out that this isn’t true. Time flies and you need to be prepared for this.

So what can you do to prepare yourself? There are a few study strategies that you should deploy. First, you should write several practice tests under timed conditions. If you do lots of practice questions but never time yourself, you’re only fooling yourself. To be clear, this doesn’t mean that it’s not okay to answer a few practice questions without a timer when you’re just entering the “practice question stage” of your bar prep. But in the days leading up to the exam, you should be operating under timed conditions. You want to try to simulate the real exam as much as possible.

Second, you want to make sure that the practice questions you are studying with are sufficiently challenging. Speaking from experience, a lot of companies like to promote their extensive bank of practice questions. While this sounds good in theory, it offers candidates little benefit if those practice questions are super straightforward (as they often are). This is because many of the questions that you will face on the actual bar exam are not straightforward. That is, they require a little bit of critical thinking. Hence why we made a deliberate effort to make our practice exams as challenging as possible. Simply put, the quality of your practice questions matters. In fact, it can make a tremendous difference when it comes to preparing for the Ontario bar exam.

Third, it’s a good idea to download or create a timing chart that tells you which question you should be on by a certain point in time. Given that the 2022 version of the Ontario bar exam consists of 160 questions over a 4 hour writing period — or, more accurately, 80 questions over 2 hours, followed by a 30 minute break, followed by another 80 questions over 2 hours — your chart might look like this:

As can be seen, this chart tells you exactly what question you should be on by a certain point in time. For example, if there’s 45 minutes left in the first 2 hour session, you should be on (or around) question 50.

Alternatively, you may want to organize your chart so that it tells you how much time should have elapsed by the time you’re on a specific question:

As with your bar prep generally, there’s no right way to organize your chart (or even use one)! A lot of candidates find them helpful, but ultimately you need to do what works best for you. The best advice that we can offer is to play around with different studying techniques and find one that works for you. So, in relation to timing, try doing a practice test with a timer chart. If you find that the chart ends up stressing you out, then don’t use it! It’s as simple as that.