Final preparations for Leaving Cert exams are well under way and many students are frantically seeking last-minute tips and tweaks to maximise their performance in the coming weeks.
The good news is that it is never too late to take on board advice from the experts.
TikTok offers a less traditional avenue for study tips – and it’s where some teachers are building huge audiences by leaning into the platform’s snappy format.
Some of them share their thoughts with The Irish Times on how students can best approach the crunch period. Their predictions may surprise and their advice on common mistakes could be crucial on the day.
Maths
TJ Hegarty, maths teacher with Breakthrough Maths
Top tips for the run-in to exams?
“A Roy Keane quote: ‘Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.’ Have all your bits sorted. Have your battery in your calculator checked. Have a clear pencil case. Pens and pencils organised. And I would start eating a healthier breakfast.
“Just the things you wouldn’t think of. Everyone will give the standard answers of doing exam papers and all that. The thing you can control too, which no one talks about, is your preparation of your physical space. Take that pressure away.”
Hot predictions for maths papers?
“A couple of things will almost certainly be on it. For the Leaving Cert, there are four big focus points. Paper one will always be algebra and calculus – in particular, logs this year. Paper two for higher level will be a focus on trigonometry and statistics. Guaranteed questions.
“For the Junior Cert, which they’re all yapping about, if you want a more tangible tip I can almost guarantee that you’ll see trigonometry, SOHCAHTOA or Pythagoras’ theorem. They will be 100 per cent on the exam.”
Common mistakes to avoid?
“You should take a Mars approach to studying. You should zoom 30,000ft away from the exam itself. What are the six or seven big topics on each exam? What are you weak on? Make sure you box them off and then just take it day by day.
“You have that written somewhere. The six or seven topics for English, for geography, maths – write them down and then you have to cover them once a fortnight. Break it down into two-week chunks. You’re touching on each topic once within that fortnight block.”
Irish
Séadhan de Poire, Irish teacher with Dublin Academy of Education
Top tips for the run-in to exams?
“For higher level Irish, I would be telling them to start to simplify material to make sure it actually makes sense. I’ve corrected the State exams, and I’ve seen a lot of students try to learn material that’s too difficult for them. They then try to reproduce this material in exam settings and because they don’t understand what they’re writing, there’s loads of mistakes in it and it ends up making no sense.
“What I tell a lot of my students is to focus on having simpler Irish that they understand and that they can use instead of trying to learn things off by heart. Especially for Irish paper one, for the essay.”
Hot predictions for Irish papers?
“For Irish paper one, it’s all based off current affairs so there’s no magical list of topics. You kind of have to be following what’s in the news in and around November, December and January time. That’s typically when the paper’s set.
“Based off that, the topics that I’m looking at with my own classes this year would be politics, because of the elections that took place here and abroad, the education system, the Irish language, the housing crisis and a little bit on technology. A tip I’d give students is you can overlap a lot of material between those different topics.
“For example, if you’re talking about politics and problems – well, housing is a political issue. You don’t have to learn five brand new essays. You learn a couple of paragraphs that suit different titles and then you try to fill in the gaps afterwards.”
Common mistakes to avoid?
“For Irish, the poems and the prose – students will really focus in on them and be worried about the marks. I kind of laugh a bit when I break it down for them. A poem is worth 5 per cent of your grade whereas an essay is worth 17 per cent. The two reading comprehensions they do are worth 17 per cent. They’re the two questions they should spend more time on than anything else.
“Then when it comes to focusing on the prose section, they can end up just writing summaries and including every event that happened in the short story. I tell my students I don’t want a summary when I’m correcting State exams. I just want to see relevant information that helps you answer the question.”
French/Spanish
Katie Lenehan, French and Spanish teacher with Dublin Academy
Top tips for the run-in to exams?
“The biggest piece of advice I would give is to recognise the importance of your reading comprehensions. In both papers, they’re worth 30 per cent of the final grade. They’re worth even more than the oral exam is and potentially it’s something that students forget about because they have so many other things on.
“I’d probably recommend doing a minimum of one of them a week, if not two. For the listening papers, I’d also try to sit a full listening paper each week . . . They’re quite practical elements that you can do. For the written paper, I’d recommend making sure you have a solid introduction and conclusion learned off for your opinion piece. And have 15 to 20 pieces of vocab for each topic that you’re planning on covering for the exam, so it nearly becomes a game of jigsaw.”
Hot predictions for French and Spanish papers?
Though she prefers to steer clear of the term predictions, Lenehan encourages her Spanish students to focus on papers from 2008-2014, which may crop up again this June. She lists a range of topics to cover – emigration, social media, AI, money, changes in Ireland and the environment.
For French, there is a slightly longer list with some overlap – phones in school, AI, the importance of voting, education reform, vaping, protests, young people and money, gender equality, emigration and housing.
Common mistakes to avoid?
“The first common mistake I see is absenteeism. They just withdraw from school completely and convince themselves that they’re just going to study at home. Apart from the study element, they’re still teenagers and they still need to be around each other. This isolation thing doesn’t do you any use in terms of how good you feel going into the exams.
“I had such crippling OCD when I was in sixth year, and I learned the hard way how important it is to look after yourself. Absolutely, study has to be a priority, but it doesn’t have to be the only priority. They need things like friendship, fresh air, good food. They need to sleep. Try to surround yourself with people that have a similar work ethic, or that have the same target grade as you, and try to encourage each other.”
Biology/Chemistry
Caoimhe Ní Mhuirceartaigh, biology and chemistry teacher
Top tips for the run-in to exams?
“The marking scheme for both biology and chemistry papers can be quite word-specific. You need to ensure when you’re answering a question that it’s not waffle and you’re hitting the short, concise points.
“For biology especially, you need to know unit one and unit two really well. You can maximise your marks by focusing on the areas that are very repetitive. Knowing the non-negotiable topics that come up every year and are worth a large portion. In biology, the two most important topics would be genetics and ecology.”
Hot predictions for biology and chemistry papers?
Both subjects, Ní Mhuirceartaigh says, have quite obvious trends. Topics she thinks may appear in the short questions section of the biology paper include food, ecology, genetics and enzymes. For questions on systems, it is worth preparing human reproduction – particularly the menstrual cycle – and the human defence system.
For experiments, the food test has a high chance of appearing along with the ecology experiment. On long questions, ecology, genetics, enzymes, microorganisms, photosynthesis and respiration could all be worth some focus.
Ní Mhuirceartaigh describes organic chemistry as the most important area to conquer ahead of sitting the chemistry exam. Given you can feature it in three of your eight answers on the paper, it can account for 38 per cent of a student’s final grade.
Common mistakes to avoid?
“Make sure the study that you do is effective. You’re not just reading over notes at this stage – you’re assessing yourself. That can mean exam questions. It can mean doing quizzes online, mind maps, flashcards. There are loads of different ways to assess yourself but don’t just be sitting reading through notes.”
