Study Timer
Working against a clock, on purpose
Timed practice tests something ordinary revision cannot: whether you can retrieve and apply what you know within the real time allowance. It does not replace learning the material, but it makes pacing problems visible before exam day.
Set the timer to the real allowance, reading time included, and stop the moment it stops. A question finished five minutes over the limit is, for exam purposes, a question left unfinished.
What the evidence on studying actually supports
Use the timer with active study rather than treating elapsed time as proof of learning. Practice questions, self-testing and explaining an idea from memory make it easier to see what you can actually retrieve without the page in front of you.
When the schedule allows, revisit material across more than one session instead of relying on a single long sitting. The timer can pace those sessions, but the useful part is returning to the material and checking what you still remember.
Questions people ask
Should this be used for practising a whole exam, or one question?
Either works, depending on what you’re checking. A single question tells you your pace on that question type; a full paper tells you whether that pace holds up under real pressure.
Is massed revision ever the right call?
Occasionally, close to a deadline where there’s genuinely no time left to space it out — but as a standing strategy it tends to underperform spaced revision on the same total hours.