Writing
Time Management

B2 First Exam

In this section:

Strategies for managing your time when completing two Cambridge Writing Tasks at the same time.

Time Management

During the Writing paper, you will need to complete two compositions. Both texts are the same amount of words and worth the same amount of points. Therefor, you should try to spend equal amounts of time on both tasks. On the B2 First exam, you should aim to spend around 40 minutes per text. 

Make sure that you give plan to both plan and check your work. Planning will actually help you write faster and will result in better pieces. 

Suggested breakdown per task:

A lot of people want to skip the planning stage and immediately start writing. However, this often leads to disorganized essays and can lead to frustration. It's actually much wiser to plan your writing.

Having a plan will:

Planning is actually really easy and not a waste of time at all. In fact, all high-scoring pieces begin with plans.

Doing both tasks together

You have approximately 40 minutes per task. However, you do not need to completely finish one task before starting the next. 

I suggest doing the following:

It's very easy to overlook errors when you've been editing a text for a long time and I'm sure you've noticed this in your native language as well. For this reason, I like using the above strategy when working on two tasks as I find it gives my mind a bit of a break, and helps me catch more errors.