Time management is very important on the PE exam. There is a strategy to getting through the exam and I'm going to give you some tips that most people use to bust through the test at a nice pace. Who knows, you might be THE GUY/GAL who finishes the morning exam so fast everyone wonders if you just threw “B” on everything and took off!
In theory you have 6 minutes per problem (240 minutes divided by 40 questions). While this is true you have to know that some problems are harder and some are easier. Some will take longer to solve and some will be so easy that you can answer them in 10 seconds.
The first time that you open up your exam you are going to run through all the problems that you know without having to put much thought into how to solving them. For example, if your depth section is going to be transportation, then you should have honed your skills for those type of problems and you should be able to cut through the breadth transportation questions with ease. There should be another topic that comes easier to you and it basically goes down from there.
Keep in mind that there are theory questions (maybe 2 per subject) and they will NOT take 6 minutes to solve. At most you are looking in a textbook to find the answer to the problem but there is no real problem solving here. You basically know the subject well enough that you can just answer those or you need to dig in a textbook to find it; either way, it shouldn't take 6 minutes on those guys, which frees up more time to solve the problems you don't know.
As you are going through the test the first time I would be making a small mark on the answer sheet reminding yourself to come back to the problems you skipped. On the second pass start working the problems you passed up. You should now have more than 6 minutes for these problems because you have just freed up time by busting though all the ones you were awesome at. If you made a serious attempt on a few of these and left nice notes in the booklet that you will come back to. These are nice, but sometime you just need to work the problem from start again. Your brain has been working so fast that sometimes something you forgot will just seem to pop in your head and you will be able to solve something again or you will magically know where to go for good help in your references. Trust me, this happens.
If you need a good practice exam to run through then check out the one I made for you! I promise it will help and you can give this little time management tip a test to see how you do – and as an added bonus to the exam I have included 10 additional free theory questions!
And that's really it. Take your time, don't rush things and make sure you have an answer down on every little bubble. You do NOT want to leave one of those blank, even if you had to totally guess. Give yourself the 25% chance of getting it correct by just throwing an answer out there. This all works with the depth portion of the exam as well. You're just dealing with different subcategories.
Do you have a good tip with time management? Shoot me an email and I'll get it posted! Good luck on the exam!
Isaac