How long should I spend answering the different questions in my English Language Paper 1 exam?

For the total exam, you have 1 hour 45 minutes.

How should we break it down?
- 1 hour = Section A
- 45 minutes = Section B

What about planning?
The exam board do factor in time for reading and planning your answers. Ideally, you should spend 15 minutes in total reading your sources and planning your responses.

This does not need to be done in the first 15 minutes of the exam, but make sure you read any source you are given fully before attempting to answer an exam question.

Top tips:
- I would aim to spend 1 minute per mark on each question.
- Question 2 and 3 are 8 marks each, so I would try to answer those questions in 8 minutes each. Including planning time (2 minutes), in total you should spend around 10 minutes answering those questions each.

If you are really confident on certain questions, and you answer them much quicker than others, I wouldn't worry. You might be good at language and weaker on structure, so if you want to spend less time on language and more time on structure, then you can. These timings are guidelines and not a strict set of rules.

If you roughly follow these timings, then you should have plenty enough time to answer all your questions, with time spare to read through them and check. As long as you give yourself at least 40 minutes to answer Section B, you should be absolutely fine.