A student who knows the material and doesn't finish the paper gets the same mark as one who didn't know it.
That's worth pausing on, because the two look identical on a report card and need completely different fixes. And pacing under time pressure is almost never taught — it's assumed to arrive on its own.
Four places, in rough order of cost.
Stalling at the start of hard questions. Eight minutes staring at question 12 with nothing on the page. This is the biggest single loss and it's a first-move problem, not a time problem.
Perfecting early questions. Ten minutes making question 2 immaculate while questions 18, 19 and 20 go unattempted. The marks are the same either way.
Re-reading. Going over the same question three times hoping it resolves. It rarely does, and each pass costs the same as the first.
No plan for the paper. Starting at question 1 and working forward with no idea what's coming, so the difficult ones arrive as surprises when there's no time left.
Scan the whole paper first. Sixty seconds. You want to know what's there, roughly what each section is worth, and which questions look easy.
Divide the time by the marks, not the questions. A 6-mark question is worth roughly six times the minutes of a 1-mark one, regardless of how long it looks.
Set a hard limit per question and hold it. When it's up, leave what you have on the page and move. Coming back with fresh eyes and five minutes beats grinding for fifteen.
Never leave a blank. Write the setup, the formula, the first step. Alberta's own guidance on written-response questions is that students should attempt every problem, because an attempt can be worth partial marks.
Reserve the last ten minutes for checking. Decide that before the exam starts, not during.
This is the part that doesn't happen. Almost all studying is untimed — notes open, no clock, pausing to look things up. That builds knowledge and does nothing for pacing.
So practise timed, at least sometimes. Full paper, actual clock, no notes. It's uncomfortable and that's the point; the discomfort is the skill being trained.
Then review where the time went rather than only what was wrong. Which question ate ten minutes? Where did the stalling happen? That's a different post-mortem than marking, and more useful for this problem.
Most time problems are first-move problems wearing a disguise.
A student who knows how to start every question doesn't stall, doesn't re-read three times, and doesn't arrive at question 18 with four minutes left. The clock is a symptom; knowing where to begin is the cause.
Which is why the fix isn't working faster. It's not getting stuck.
Timed practice tests, for when the clock is the hard part — and first-move training, for when it's the cause.
Related: “I didn't know where to start” — the most expensive sentence in high school math · The cheapest fifteen marks in high school