There is a particular look on somebody’s face when they realise that having the book in front of them is not going to save them. It usually arrives around question twelve, with fifteen minutes left.
The arithmetic nobody does beforehand
20 questions. 45 minutes. That is two minutes and fifteen seconds per question, including reading the question, considering four options, and — if you need to — finding the relevant clause.
Spend four minutes on a couple of awkward ones and you have eaten the slack for five others. The constraint is not knowledge. It is navigation.
What is actually being tested
An open-book assessment is testing something quite specific: whether you can operate the document. In practice, that means knowing:
- which document covers a given subject at all
- roughly where in it that subject lives
- what the section is called, so the index and contents page work for you
- which tables exist, and what each one is for
None of this requires memorising values. All of it requires familiarity.
Building that familiarity
Reading the document cover to cover does not build it. You will finish, feel you have revised, and still not know where anything is — because passive reading trains recognition, not retrieval.
What does build it is repeatedly answering the question “where would I find that?” Give yourself a heading — “setting out site distances”, “permitted layer thicknesses”, “precautions near trees” — and say, out loud or on paper, which document and which section it sits in. Then check.
That drill is dull for about ten minutes and then it becomes quite satisfying, because you can feel it working. It is also why the app includes a set of look-up drills for every certificate, alongside the practice questions.
A practical exam-day habit
Answer everything you know cold first, in one pass, without opening anything. Then go back for the ones needing a look-up, with the clock showing you exactly how much time you have per remaining question.
That ordering matters: it converts an unknown number of slow questions into a known one, and it stops a single awkward clause from eating the time that eight easy marks were sitting in.
One caveat
Assessment arrangements — including which documents you may bring — are set by the scheme and by your assessment centre, not by us, and they change from time to time. Confirm the current arrangements before you book.
