50 days: advice on core subjects, English and maths

[ leavingcertenglish.net ]

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.

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

Practice, practice, practice, practice, practice. Choose a genre (article, speech, report, personal essay, proposal) and write on a topic that interests you. Pay attention to layout and style.

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.

Learn to spell the word CHARACTER (there’s only one ‘h’ and it’s at the beginning).

Practice describing and interpreting visual texts (photos, book covers, cartoons, advertising campaigns).

Structure your answers. Stream-of-consciousness style answers rarely achieve a good grade, particularly if the student gets stuck exploring one point in excessive detail and/or fails to use paragraphs effectively.

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.

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

Be opinionated.

[ Themathstutor.ie ]

Practice the basics of each area of maths - it makes the more advanced material much easier! If you are shaky on basic probability, then Bernoulli Trials are going to be a bit of a stretch.

Make sure you understand basic algebra and are fluent in applying it to solving problems. If you are making mistakes in algebra, go back and revise it, it will make other topics easier.

Having said that, you should spend time revising all topics, not just your favourites! It’s much better to be average in all topics than to be excellent in one or two and weak in the others.

Get help if you are stuck on something. It might be easier than you think, and can be the key to other areas, so don’t suffer in silence! Ask your teacher, parents, friends or go online, there’s lots of help available.

Face up to the “wordiness” of problems associated with Project Maths. For some people, the biggest challenge is in extracting the relevant information and numbers from a long “story”. Practice these now and get used to interpreting them.

For Leaving Cert, get used to doing the Context and Applications questions which are found in Section B of each paper. This way, you will become comfortable with questions on real-world applications that you may not have seen before the day of the exam. If you can deal with an arbelos, a robotic arm or a jigsaw puzzle, then it will help you to deal with whatever unusual object or situation comes in 2014.

Make sure you know the structure of the papers - how many questions, how many marks for each, and the time allocation. Test yourself based on those timings, and use printouts of real exam papers to get used to writing in the booklet. You can find all past papers in one place on www.themathstutor.ie/past-exam-papers.html, and the marking schemes are there too.

Practicing past papers also helps to get a feel for the level required - but remember Project Maths is not intended to be predictable in terms of specific topics being examined. All items from the syllabus are examinable. All questions are mandatory for Junior Cert students, and there is only a small element of choice in one question for Leaving Cert.

Start practicing exam technique NOW, not the day of the exam. Get into good habits from now on, such as attempting all parts of all questions, showing your work, and checking your answers. If you do this, it will be second nature to you on the day of the exam, and it will make a big difference in your grade.