An essay exam with three questions and two hours is a scheduling problem before it is a writing problem. Answer one question for fifty minutes, drift on the second, and you find out at the ninety-minute mark that the last one still has to be written in thirty.
This splitter does the arithmetic for you. Give it the total exam time and how many essays you have to write, and it breaks each essay into planning, writing and review so you know when to stop and move on.
One honest detail: the split is fixed at 15% planning, 70% writing and 15% review. It is a guideline, not a promise, and it is the same for everybody who uses the page.
Split your essay exam time across planning, writing, and review so you never hand in a half-finished essay.
How it works
Two numbers go in: total exam time in minutes and the number of essays. Divide the first by the second and you get the time per essay, then each essay’s slice is cut 15% for planning, 70% for writing and 15% for review. The answer comes back as a heading with the time per essay, a three-row table showing phase, time and percentage, and a total line confirming the exam time across the number of essays.
Times are printed in minutes and seconds, so a slice of 4.5 minutes reads as 4m 30s rather than rounding down to 4 minutes. An empty field or anything that is not a positive number comes back as “Please fill in all fields.” or “Please enter valid numbers.” Reset clears both boxes.
Work in minutes, not hours, because that is the unit the table uses. A 90 minute exam goes in as 90, a three hour exam as 180, and a two hour exam with four essays as 120 and 4.
A worked example
Total 90 minutes, three essays. Ninety divided by three is 30 minutes each: 4m 30s planning (15% of 30), 21m 00s writing (70%) and 4m 30s review (15%). The total line reads 90m 00s across 3 essays, which is the number you typed, confirming nothing was lost in the division.
Now 100 minutes across three essays, because a real exam rarely divides neatly. Each essay gets 33m 20s, split into 5m 00s planning, 23m 20s writing and 5m 00s review. Five minutes of planning is roughly a thesis plus three point-form reasons, and that is exactly what it is for.
Two essays in 120 minutes gives 60 minutes each: 9m 00s, 42m 00s, 9m 00s. Notice what the writing block costs you – forty-two minutes is where the argument actually gets built, and it is the piece people short-change when they plan for too long.
Where the split breaks down
The percentages cannot be changed. If your professor has said out loud to spend half the exam planning, or your handwriting means you write slower than you think, the table will not follow you. Take the numbers as a starting shape and adjust them on the back of the question paper.
Equal division is the other assumption. Three essays and 120 minutes gives each forty minutes, whether one question is worth 10 marks or 30. Where the questions are weighted differently, split the time by marks yourself first, then feed each block through separately as its own calculation.
Review is also the first thing anyone sacrifices when the writing runs long, which is how a thesis that made sense in your head ends up missing a paragraph. Treat the last 15% as untouchable: if you reach review with nothing left, stop writing a fourth point instead of dropping the proofread.
One last thing about the seconds. Seeing 23m 20s feels precise, and it is only arithmetic. Use it as a checkpoint you glance at, not a stopwatch you obey – the point of the number is knowing roughly when to move, not starting the next phase at 23 minutes and 20 seconds exactly.
Other tools
- Exam Time Per Question — minutes per question when the exam is not essays
- Free Time Finder — what is left in the week after everything else
- Hours Between Times — the gap between two clock times
Frequently asked questions
What unit do I enter the exam time in?
Minutes. Ninety minutes is 90, two hours is 120, three hours is 180. The result prints minutes and seconds, so entering hours would give you a split far too small to use.
Can I change the 15, 70 and 15?
Not on this page, it is a fixed split. If your own pattern is different – more planning on a source-based question, more review on a short answer – run the calculation and then shift the minutes yourself. The tool is there to give you a defensible default.
How many essays can it handle?
Any positive number, since it is one division. Five essays in a two hour exam gives 24 minutes each, split 3m 36s, 16m 48s and 3m 36s, and at that size the planning slice starts to get thin, which is a sign the exam is really a short-answer paper.
Should I plan every essay before I start writing?
Only within the essay you are on. Planning all of them up front costs time you do not get back, and the plan for question three usually changes once you have written question one. Plan, write, review, move – that order is what the split is built around.
What if I finish early?
Go back through the review slices you rushed. Read the opening line of each essay on its own, check that every paragraph answers the question that was asked, and fix the citations you left as brackets. Ten minutes at that point is worth more than an extra sentence anywhere in the paper.