top tips for exam success

Just study, don’t procrastinate. #RepeatAdvice @SueBo_1

2 Put away the laptop. Get your parents to hide the battery so you won’t be tempted. @paddykell

3 Draw up a realistic timetable. Short, frequent study sessions. You need to be doing more than your homework.

4 Organise yourself. It’s never too late. Clear notes, tidy folders. Don’t stress yourself out. @Orlaith_Farrell

5 Don’t prioritise any one subject. All subjects should get equal time. Allow two hours each weekend for each subject and around 30-40 minutes per night for studying what was covered on that day in the classroom.

6 Print chief examiners’ reports for your subjects. They give sample answers which you can use as a guide for answering style. #studytips, @NatashaLynchEF

7 How much time do you spend on the internet? Half-an-hour in the morning, an hour in the evening? It all adds up. Two hours a day is 14 per week, 56 per month. Imagine if you were to spend just half of that revising.

8 Fewer late nights. The worst thing you can do at the weekends is spend the whole night up, and the whole day in bed. Try to get to bed by 1am at the latest on weekends, and get up early .

9 Divide up work with a friend, then meet up, photocopy each other’s notes, teach each other what you learned. #studybuddy, @NatashaLynchEF

10 Reading a book isn’t studying – it’s reading a book. Set a target: “I will revise this topic for 45 minutes”. Take notes as you go. Put away the books. Do an exam question. Now that’s study.

11 Get familiar with the layout of the exam paper. Some papers are tricky and complicated instructions could throw you on the day.

12 Don’t cut too many corners. Every year students emerge devastated because they listened to rumours about what was coming up. The truth is anything can come up. The papers are designed to be unpredictable.

13 Record your revision notes on a dictaphone, download onto your phone, revise on the move. #studytips, @NatashaLynchEF

14 Understand what you’re studying – or at least try. Rephrase in your own words when possible. Students who do well in exams don’t just vomit up facts, they demonstrate real understanding.

15 Keep the CAO in mind. Students tend to forget about what they put down on their CAO forms in the rush to study for the Leaving Cert. It’s no harm to keep thinking about what course you want to do, and keep researching different areas. @paddykell

16 Don’t talk about what study you’re doing and don’t listen to other people about what they’re doing. Lots of people lie about what they’re doing or not doing. The naturally brilliant friend who did nothing but somehow managed a B1 in the mocks is probably telling fibs about how hard they’re working.

17Eat! Porridge can be perfectly edible with some minor adjustments. Some fast ones include putting chocolate chips, bananas, peanut butter, or even molasses and strawberries on it. It takes the notion of inedible slop away and keeps you going all morning. @ClareReidy1

18 My friends and I started our own nerdy trend of dunking Nature Valley bars into yogurt pots, which I understand sounds revolting to some people, but it got us through. @ClareReidy1

19 Have something to divert your attention: being solely focused on a few days in June at this stage will fry your brain.

20 Exercise. Don’t study any later than 10pm, and if you can find the energy, go for a walk. It releases endorphins in your brain that make you feel good about yourself, and it clears your head after hours of studying. @paddykell

21 Peanut butter cups and chocolate bars with nuts are brilliant brain food, and addictive too. @ClareReidy1

22 Keep the exams in perspective. None of the following things will be dictated by how you do in the Leaving Cert: where you live, who you marry, how often you marry, how many icecreams you eat in your lifetime; your overall health and well-being; the number of stones that work their way into your shoes resulting in you repeatedly hopping about on one foot to remove them; the amount of love in your life.

English


23 About 75 per cent of Junior Cert and 55 per cent of Leaving Cert English is completely unseen until you open the paper. That does not mean you can’t study for the exam. You are learning skills rather than rote-learning information.

24 Read, read, read. If you don’t read widely, you’ll never become a good writer.

25 Learn quotes from your texts. Record them onto your smartphone or iPod and listen on the way into school.

26 Don’t learn essays off by heart. If you’re writing a short story, have some examples of characterisation and setting ready to adapt to your title. Creative writing needs to be vivid and entertaining. Show, don’t tell. The reader should have specific sights, sounds and smells in their minds-eye as they read your writing.

27 Read your work out loud. You’ll hear mistakes sooner than you’ll see them.

28 Judging a character is complex: examine what they say, what they do, how they look, what they think and feel and other people’s opinions of them. Don’t take them at their word – characters often lie, to themselves and others.

29Learn to spell the word character. There’s only one “h” and it’s at the beginning.

30Structure your answers. Stream-of-consciousness style answers rarely achieve a good grade, particularly if you get stuck exploring one point in excessive detail.

31 Essays on studied texts must use a formal style. Points must be supported with relevant and accurate quotes.

32 Know your single text very well, inside out. Whether you’re using reference or quotation to support your answer, you need to know the text in detail.

33 In the comparative study, you should ask yourself “what’s this text all about?”. When you make a list with that heading for all three texts, you can more clearly see what they have in common. You then need to find key moments in each to support your comparisons. And you should be comparing them all the time.

34 You have about an hour per section in the exam. Most people will write between seven and 10 paragraphs. Time yourself and write three paragraphs in 20 minutes for a bit of bite-sized preparation if you’re pressed for time.

35 Don’t listen to the poetry tips. Prepare your favourite poets well and you will be rewarded. The more you have to say about a poet’s work the better, so have a view which you can back up by referencing the poet’s work.

Maths

36 Practising past exam papers is a very important part of developing good exam technique. Start now if you haven’t already.

37 You must know the proofs and theorems and the explanation of the vocabulary used.

38 Use the official marking schemes. They often show more than one acceptable method of solving a question. The marking schemes also show you how marks were allocated by the examiners across all parts of all questions in previous exams, but there’s no real need for you to analyse this. It is not possible to predict the allocation of marks within a question – the allocation can vary hugely and in unexpected ways.

39 Suppose you decide to give five hours a week to maths, a reasonable amount at this stage of the year. Break this up into five 35 minutes slots each week-night giving you just about two hours at weekend.

40 Maths is the only Leaving Cert subject without a choice on the paper. Therefore you must keep up with the material covered in class.

41 Weekend study ideally should be used for attempting questions from past papers and sample papers. It is vital to know the exact set-up of your exam, how many questions, the wording used, etc. Time yourself to get used to the time restraints.