Hi! I was wondering, what is the best approach to using our perusal time for science papers? We get 5 minutes perusal and I know not to even try answering these questions in my head but I subconsciously do it anyway.
For pretty much every exam, your perusal time should be your planning time. Look at the question, read it, and in that 10 seconds it takes to read the question, ask yourself -
do you think you can answer this question. If yes, ignore it, move on. You don't have long to make this decision, so you need to make it based on your initial thoughts only. Does it look like one you've answered before? Is it a topic you're extremely confident in? You don't have the time to start to answer the question, only to decide if you can answer it. The reason for this is so you can move on to the next question and make the same judgement - do you think you can answer that question? By the end of the perusal time, you should have a list of questions in your mind that you're not confident you can answer. If you have more perusal time, then you can spend some time on those, and trying to figure them out - but the key is, once you can start writing, you should start working on the questions you know you can answer.
The reason for this is simple - if you run out of time at the end, and there are questions you haven't answered, you don't want the questions with no answers to be questions that you could answer. If you waste 20 minutes on a question that you're going to get wrong because you didn't know what to do, that's 20 minutes you could've spent finishing questions that you do know the answer to. If you finish all the questions you can answer early, then any time spent trying to answer questions you weren't confident about isn't time wasted - it's time well spent, trying to answer those questions.
If you finish perusal time and don't want to spend the last of it working out questions you're unsure about, or you're confident you can answer all the questions, then I would spent the rest of that time in the multiple choice section. Find some questions you can answer, answer them, memorise what the option was. I'd only do this for 2 or 3 questions, but do it for any you're confident you will remember what the option is. Then, once you can start writing, immediately colour in the bubbles for those questions, then move to the short answer section. It's not worth your time starting with multiple choice after writing time starts, again in case you run out of time at the end and need to start guessing multiple choice, but you don't waste time on it if it's time you couldn't spend on short answer /anyway/.