A student who scores 85 at home and 60 in the hall has not been unlucky. They have been practising a different task. At home there was a clock they ignored, a book within reach, and permission to look away and come back. The exam removes all three at once.
What the clock actually changes
- Question selection. Under time you must decide within seconds whether a question is worth starting now or leaving for the second pass. Untimed practice never trains that decision.
- Method choice. With unlimited time you can try the long method and still finish. In the hall, picking the long method on question three is what costs you question eleven.
- Checking. Most marks lost to "silly mistakes" are lost because there was no time left to reread the question. That time has to be planned, not hoped for.
How to practise so the numbers match
- 1Sit at least one paper a week under real conditions: full length, correct duration, one sitting, nothing on the desk that will not be there on the day.
- 2Write the time on the page every ten questions. You are training a sense of pace, not just answering.
- 3When the time is up, stop. Then continue in a different colour. The first colour is your real score; the second tells you how much of the gap is speed rather than knowledge.
- 4Mark it yourself, the same day, with the explanations open.
Keep both numbers. "62 in time, 81 given ten more minutes" is a diagnosis. A single score is not.
Untimed practice still has a job
Learning a new method should be untimed and unhurried. Speed on a method you do not understand is just faster confusion. The mistake is staying there. Untimed work is where a skill is built; timed work is where you find out whether it survives contact with an exam.
On EXAMEV, practice mode is the unhurried version, and timed mode runs a full paper against the real clock. Alternate them: learn untimed, prove it timed.