Planning the day

The examination is a time-management problem wearing a structural engineering costume. Marks per minute is the only planning principle that matters.

Start from marks per minute

The Institution's own preparation guidance recommends building a personal timetable and reviewing it after mock exams. The arithmetic behind any such timetable is the same, and you can do it yourself:

• The Chartered and Incorporated papers give 420 minutes of writing for 100 marks — 4.2 minutes per mark.
• The supplementary paper gives 210 minutes for 80 marks — 2.6 minutes per mark.

Multiply each section's marks by that figure and you have a first-cut timetable. Then adjust it, because a raw mark-proportional split is not quite right:

• Reserve time up front for reading and choosing. Ten to fifteen minutes thinking about the scheme before committing is time repaid several times over. Deciding you picked the wrong scheme at 14:00 is unrecoverable.
• Reserve time at the end for checking. Half an hour is a common allowance, and it is the first thing candidates sacrifice and the last thing they should.
• Drawings usually take longer than their marks suggest. They are physical work at a fixed speed.
• Calculations usually run over. Set a hard stop and honour it.

The Institution publishes an indicative timetable in the Exam Preparation Guidance. Build your own from your own mocks rather than adopting anyone else's — the point is that it is personalised.

Commit early, and stop optimising

The single most expensive mistake is re-opening the scheme decision. Once you have chosen, everything downstream — calculations, drawings, details, method statement — depends on it. Changing at midday means restarting three sections.

Choose the question you can answer completely, not the one that looks most interesting. A confident, complete answer to an ordinary question beats a brilliant half-answer.

When you fall behind

You will. The guidance from candidates who passed is consistent and worth taking literally: do not panic, get the essential points down, and attempt every part, even if some become brief notes.

That advice is arithmetically sound. Marks are distributed across five sections, and the early marks in any section are the easiest to earn. A method statement sketched in ten minutes scores; a method statement never started scores nothing, however good your calculations were.

Sit full mocks, in real conditions

The most repeated piece of advice from successful candidates: sit complete mock papers under exam conditions — no phone, packed lunch, the folder you intend to bring, the full duration. Pick questions you have not looked at beforehand so that opening the paper on the day is not a new experience.

For the supplementary paper, mock to 3½ hours with no break. Rehearsing a seven-hour day for a three-and-a-half-hour paper is the commonest planning error on that route.