CBSE board exams 2026: How to finish your paper on time without writing faster

Secure marks first, attempt marks next, negotiate marks last – your guide to staying in control during CBSE Board exams.

The CBSE board exams begin on February 17, and you can already feel the atmosphere changing: the classroom chatter thins out, the revision piles grow taller, and the exam hall starts appearing in your head like an inevitable scene. But the real panic rarely arrives with a dramatic heartbeat. It arrives quietly, ten minutes into the paper, when you realise you have been wrestling with one question while the rest of the exam moves on without you. The clock is not your enemy, but it is not your friend either. What will save you now is not speed. It is control: the ability to make clean decisions, cut losses early, and keep your paper intact.

The first five minutes: Stop “starting”, start organising

The smartest thing you can do at the beginning of your CBSE Board exam is delay your first answer. Not by much — five minutes — but long enough to take control of the paper’s architecture. When you start immediately, you let the paper set your rhythm. When you scan first, you set it.Use the first five minutes to remove surprise. Locate the compulsory parts, the internal choices, the high-mark questions that will need clean thinking, and the sections that are designed to trap you in time. You should know what you’re going to attempt first, what you’ll keep for later, and what you’ll avoid until your marks are banked. A simple way to think about it is: Secure marks first, attempt marks next, negotiate marks last.

Budget the paper

Treat each exam like a budget where every question has a price and every extra minute has an opportunity cost.The cleanest approach is to calculate a rough “minutes per mark” rate, then convert it into caps you can live with. It won’t be mathematically perfect, but it will prevent the real killer: overspending time on low-return questions.For example, if you have 180 minutes for 100 marks, you have roughly 1.8 minutes per mark. That means a 5-mark question cannot casually take 20 minutes unless you’re prepared to steal time from elsewhere. This is the mindset shift: the question doesn’t get unlimited time because it is hard. It gets time proportional to its value.Keep a buffer at the end, not as a luxury, but as insurance. That last ten minutes is where you fix the marks you often lose for avoidable reasons: Missed sub-parts, wrong question number, careless units, or an OMR error.

The move-on rule: Difference between calm and chaos

Here is the most intelligent thing you can do in an exam hall: Leave a question unfinished and move on without spiralling. Most students don’t fail because they can’t solve. They fail because they refuse to cut losses.A hard question is not your enemy; attachment is. The moment you start bargaining — “just one more step” — you are no longer solving. You are donating time to protect your ego.So you need a move-on rule that is mechanical enough to override emotion. When you hit the cap, you park the question cleanly, leave yourself a small note about the approach, and return only when the rest of the paper is safe.This isn’t quitting. This is prioritisation. Examiners reward completion far more consistently than they reward half-finished ambition.A practical move-on rule looks like this:

And when you move, do it cleanly: Star it, jot the first step or formula beside it, and leave. That small roadmap saves you time when you return.

Choose one strategy, not ten moods

Time management collapses when you improvise. A strategy is simply a pre-decided pattern that prevents panic from driving your choices. Different papers reward different strategies, so pick one that matches the format.If the paper is mixed — objective, short, long — the ‘score-first’ strategy works best. Finish the easy conversions across sections first, then return for the heavier questions. If sections are evenly weighted, the “section-lock” strategy saves you from sacrificing an entire section to one bad patch. And if it’s quant-heavy, the two-pass strategy is your best friend: Do what you can solve cleanly first, then return for the tougher ones when your paper already has marks on it.

The quiet rules that protect your score

Your CBSE Board exam paper doesn’t care about your effort, it cares about what you finished, how clearly you wrote it, and whether you avoided unforced errors. So keep a few rules in mind:

Bottom Line

When you walk into an exam hall, your biggest opponent is not the syllabus. It’s the moment your attention gets captured by the wrong question. Solve that — by deciding early and moving on when necessary — and the clock stops bullying you. It becomes what it always was: a constraint you can work with.