How to get your A1: Physics

With its long detailed course with tricky problems and it is a hassle when it comes to exam time. But there are a few things you can do to make life easier when it comes to D-Day.

Know your experiments: this is the part of the exam where you can score 120 out of 120 handily. These questions often repeat themselves throughout the years. Practise them even if they are not likely to come up. Practise all the past paper questions. Many of them repeat. When practising any physics question, make sure you can identify what chapter it is from, what formulae are relevant and then figure out what steps are required to get to the answer. When you get the answer wrong, learn from your mistakes

Formulae are the heart and soul of this exam. Know where to find them, and any other key information, in your maths tables booklet. Be aware that formulae that are not in the log tables are the ones that are asked most frequently. What helped me the most was grouping all the relevant formulae from the sections of the course and learning them group by group. This is what I believe got me my A1.

Learn your definitions, derivations and units. These are the fundamentals to each question.

Don’t leave any of the sections out, as some of them may be easy questions in the exam. Especially particle physics and applied electricity as they are guaranteed to be asked.

Again, doing well in the physics exam requires a lot of practise. Repetition of the processes will teach you how to approach questions and understand how to manipulate the formulae. If you can do that, there is no question you can’t solve.

Shreyash Pattanayak

Engineering

UCD