A live test gets its start time on the pre-live screen of the control room, on the card headed Start time - the same screen that carries the Go Live button. Set a date and time there and every student sitting in the waiting room sees a countdown instead of an open-ended wait. Switch on Start automatically, just below the field, and the session begins by itself when the countdown reaches zero, provided you still have the control room open. That last clause is not a footnote. It is the whole design, and it is the part worth reading on for.
This is the scheduling half of running a live session. Running a live mock test for a whole batch covers the session itself once it starts, and running a live quiz on students' phones covers the classroom version where the whole room is in front of you anyway.
Where the Start Time Lives
The schedule panel is not in the question editor. It sits on the pre-live screen of the control room, and that screen only exists once the live exam is published - a draft has no waiting room for anybody to wait in. So the order is fixed: build the paper, publish the live exam, open the control room, then set the time. If you cannot find the field, you are almost certainly still looking at a draft.
The field is an ordinary date-and-time picker reading your device's clock, and the panel names the time zone it is reading right underneath. That label matters more than it looks: a creator scheduling for a batch in another city needs to know which clock they just typed into. What gets stored is an absolute instant rather than the text you typed, so a student elsewhere sees the same moment expressed in their own local time - the countdown agrees across devices instead of arguing with them.
What Students See Before It Opens
With no start time set, the waiting room says "Waiting for your teacher to start" and nothing more. That is honest and useless. It could mean anything, so students ask out loud, repeatedly, and you spend the minutes before question one answering the same question instead of setting up.
Set a time and that same space becomes a countdown. It reads "Starts in" followed by a figure ticking down in minutes and seconds, picking up an hours field when there is more than an hour to go, with the scheduled time spelled out underneath in the student's own local time. The standing line changes too: instead of waiting for a teacher, it tells them they are in and to keep the tab open. If you are projecting, the big screen carries the same countdown at cinema size with "Scheduled for" beneath it, so nobody at the back has to ask whether anything is on.
Two details in that countdown are deliberate rather than decorative. It runs on a server-corrected clock and never the phone's own, because device clocks drift and a countdown that disagrees between two devices in the same room is worse than no countdown. And it never shows a negative number - past zero it switches to "Starting shortly", so a teacher who is still wrestling with the projector reads as running late rather than as broken software.
Auto-Start, and the One Thing It Needs
The Start automatically switch appears only once a time is set, and it is off until you turn it on. With it on, the session begins on its own once the time arrives - but it fires from your own control room, in your own browser. There is no server-side job behind it, no cron, nothing scheduled anywhere but the tab in front of you. Close that tab and nothing starts. The check also runs the moment the control room loads, so opening it after the time has already passed, with the switch on, starts the real exam at once - including in a tab you opened in the background.
Before it begins, it checks the following, and all of them have to hold.
- A start time is set and Start automatically is switched on.
- The live exam is in the published state - not a draft, not already live, not ended.
- The server-corrected clock has passed the scheduled moment.
- You are not in the middle of a rehearsal.
- It has not already fired once on this screen.
That rehearsal guard repays knowing about. A rehearsal already makes the control room look live, so an auto-start underneath it would begin the real exam with nothing on your screen changing - students walking into a room nobody is driving. Instead the start is held and a banner says so in plain words: your scheduled start time has passed and the real exam has not started. Leave the rehearsal and it goes live immediately.
A scheduled start is a promise to the room, not an instruction to a server. The countdown hitting zero does not open the paper - you do, or your open control room does it on your behalf.
Changing or Clearing the Schedule
Pick a different time in the same field and it saves as you pick it. There is no separate save button, and a second control tab or your phone picks the change up on its next sync. The small cross beside the field clears the schedule outright, and clearing it also switches auto-start off. That pairing is intentional: an auto-start with no time to fire on is a switch that looks armed and does nothing. Set a new time and you turn the switch back on yourself.
Moving a time after you have announced it is the expensive case, because nothing in the product tells anyone. There are no reminder emails, no SMS and no WhatsApp about a test - transactional account mail for signup and password reset is the only email MockSetu sends. If you move a start time, you announce the move on whatever channel you used the first time, and you assume a student who misses that message will turn up at the old one.
Announce a Window, Not an Instant
A scheduled time is a technical fact. What your batch needs is an instruction, and the instruction should be a window. Tell them when to be in the room, not when the paper opens - those are different minutes, and the gap between them is where a room settles down.
- Send the join link, or the eight-character code, the evening before - with the window written beside it, not just the start time.
- Say what they will see on arriving: a countdown with a real number on it. A student who lands early and expects a blank screen assumes the link is broken.
- Say what to do if there is no countdown - refresh once, then re-check the code - so the first message you get is not a screenshot of a waiting room.
- Open the control room yourself well before the time, especially with auto-start on. It is the thing the start depends on.
- Leave the join link on the big screen while the room fills, so a latecomer reads it off the wall instead of interrupting you for it.
As an example of the shape: if the paper opens at 7 pm, ask them to be in the room by ten to seven. The countdown does the rest of the work - a number to watch settles a room, and a spinner sends it to the group chat.
The Batch That Arrives at the Minute
Some of them always will. A live session handles it better than you might fear: a student who joins while the room is running comes straight in on the question the room is currently on, so they are inside and following rather than locked out. What they lose is the questions already gone: a closed question does not reopen, not for one student and not for the room. That is the honest trade of a shared pace.
Which is why the pre-flight card on the control room counts the students present right now rather than everyone who has ever joined. That is the number to read before pressing Go Live - wait a beat if it looks short, then start. And going live only opens the waiting room: nothing appears on a student's screen until you unlock the first question, so there is still a pause between starting the session and starting the paper. Use it for the one-line reminder you always forget.
What a Schedule Does Not Do
Worth saying plainly, because the tools you are comparing this against will not say it. A start time is not an access window. It will not lock a late student out, it will not close the room at a deadline, and there is no equivalent setting on an ordinary mock test - a published paper is open from the moment it is published, to anyone with the link, because published papers are public. There is no proctoring of any kind here either: no webcam, no lockdown browser, no tab-switch detection, no question shuffling and no attempt limits. A start time is a courtesy to the room and never an integrity control.
And if the sitting is genuinely large, do not force it through one live room. A live session is a shared pace - one question for everybody, one clock, one host driving it - and that shape earns its keep with a class rather than a crowd. Publish the paper as an ordinary mock, announce your own window for it, and let people sit it at their own speed.
Before You Put a Time on Anything
The schedule is the last decision in a job that is mostly earlier. Write the instructions before you set the time, not after - an online exam instructions template students will actually read is the fastest way to get that done, and the join window belongs in it. Then publish, open the control room, set the time, and send the link.
Students reach a live room by its link or its eight-character code, never by browsing: the public library carries a join-with-code button and a tab listing the rooms a student has already been in, but the room itself is not something they stumble on. The link is your entire distribution, which is one more reason to send it the night before rather than at the minute. Everything a creator can run on MockSetu - live sessions, scheduled or not, alongside ordinary timed papers - sits behind one free account, and the schedule card described here is on every live exam you publish.