CILLIAN FAHY, who got nine As in his Leaving Certificate, offers advice on how to maximise your points by outlining what you should and should not do during revision in the crucial run-up to the exams
ALL YEAR you’ve been reading, highlighting, practising questions, doing exercises, making notes and refining notes. In the last few weeks before the Leaving the quality of your study must change. Now is the time to start ingesting what you have prepared.
You need to get the right information out of your folder and into your head. People call it, rather sniffily, “rote-learning” and it’s frowned upon nowadays but the truth is that you are going to have to reproduce a lot of material over the weeks of your exams and there’s only one way to do that – learn it off by heart.
This means that you should be making a plan, subject by subject and section by section, for what you need to commit to your memory in the next few weeks. Make this plan, plot this learning path, and stick to it.
But while it is important to change the focus and quality of your study in the next few weeks, you do not want to make any radical changes to your routine. People often see the Leaving coming and panic, pledging to jump from four hours a day to 12, setting their alarms for 5am and drawing up timetables that reach into the small hours. This is a bad idea for two main reasons.
1. YOUR BODYwill not react well, or adapt well, to a sudden and dramatic change in lifestyle and this is likely to result in tiredness, lack of concentration and stress.
If you feel you need a couple of extra hours a day to study in these last weeks, take them from non-essential activities like TV, and not from essential ones like sleep
2. YOU WON'Tbe able to sustain it. Change that is too extreme will burn you out and you'll soon learn that you simply can't do four hours of study straight without a break.
Now is a good time to do a subject by subject audit of where you’re at. Be brutally honest – where are your weak spots? If you know you are strong in some areas of a subject now is the time to prioritise the shadowy areas.
You also need to weight your learning in line with the marking schemes. There’s no sense in spending a precious half day on an area that is worth relatively few marks and ignoring an area that’s worth a great deal more.
Picture the scene – the frazzled Leaving Cert student schlepping along the corridor with chaotic sheaves of notes poking out of every bag and pocket, while he frantically tries to dig out the key page he wants to reread before entering the exam hall.
Don’t be that student. Do a final stationery run and get slim paper folders into which you will insert your briefest, more concise, most important and final notes on each subject. The ones you want to be reading on the bus in the way into the exam. The ones you will glance at just before you enter the hall that might just illuminate an entire question for you.
This process will help you to identify what you really need to know in the final weeks.
Like “rote-learning”, “prediction” has become an expletive in the Leaving Cert lexicon. Everyone tells you that prediction is dangerous, foolhardy, misguided. I do not agree. Life is all about priorities and there is no way you can evenly prepare for every single aspect of every subject. Even if you lived under a stone and never heard a prediction, you’d end up spending a little more time on some poets than others. When I studied for the Leaving I gave fair coverage to all subjects, but as the exams drew closer and I heard whispers on the wind, I reacted accordingly. I didn’t close the door on every other topic – I always kept the possibility of a surprise in mind – but I showed a little favouritism.
Many people learn their essays for Irish and English off by heart, word for word. Despite what I said earlier about the importance of rote-learning in some areas, I have reservations when it comes to composition. It’s a great idea to learn off vocabulary for an Irish essay on politics, for example, or to learn off a plan for an essay on how young people in Ireland experience life. You might even learn off a bundle of ideas that would add up to a paragraph. The problem with learning actual sequences of sentences, however, is twofold.
1. THE EXAMINER
The examiner will be looking out for regurgitated essays, and she will spot them by how well they have reflected the actual essay title.
Since it is very unlikely that the essay you have learned, however good it is, will actually match the composition title exactly, you may be caught out if you don’t apply a little creativity
2. OFF-BY-HEART
Off-by-heart essays can squash creativity. If you go into the exam with 800 pre-learned words waiting to gush from your pen, you are less likely to choose a composition title that actually suits you and shows what you can do.
You will be so focused on getting it all down as learned, you may forget to answer the question.
I have mixed feelings about skipping school to revise. If you have reached the stage where you are ready to start committing your notes to memory, your time might not be best spent doing exercises and past papers in class.
Maybe you are ready to go it alone but your teacher will have insights or predictions that you don’t want to miss. She may not say it outright, but if she suddenly starts focusing on a particular subject or author, it could be significant.
If you do decide to stay home, make sure to stay in the loop.
Your new enemies
1. Countdowns
Friends, radio stations, siblings, parents – no matter where it issues from, the doomsday clock is to be ignored. You have a plan and you’re sticking to it. It doesn’t matter if there are 845 hours, 22 minutes and 13 seconds left until the Leaving Cert
2. Alarmists
You will always meet the guy who swears blind that Polonius is coming up, or that some other weird and unlikely aspect of a course is a definite. Predictions need to come from more than one source to be given any credence and if it sounds too crazy to be true, it probably isn’t
3. Facebook
I disabled mine for the last two months leading up to the Leaving. You say you’ll just check in for five minutes but you know how it goes. Facebook is also is a likely place to stumble upon enemies numbers one and two.
4. Coronation Street
Or EastEnders, Desperate Housewivesor whatever. Any TV show that is on religiously every day and that you have a compulsion to watch is a terrible thief of time. Half an hour a day is two and a half hours a week you could be spending on something more useful – if not study, then exercise
5. Extreme behaviour
Late nights, getting up in the dark, weird food, compulsive pencil sharpening: extreme behaviours will add to your stress, not alleviate it. Do what’s normal for you
In the last few weeks before the exams, apparently innocent actors can become sinister saboteurs; stealing time and stirring up stress
Your new best friends
This is a shorter list but these three Rs will stand to you and protect against your enemies
1. The right rewards
The funny thing about rewards is that they seem to work as soon as you call them rewards. People who give up smoking often find that they need to replace that reward, for a small job done, with something else, and it doesn't really matter what it is – coffee, a phone call to a friend, a walk around the block – it's the ritual that counts. If possible, try and find rewards that complement your study. I sent a friend some podcasts of interesting economics lectures and he uses them as a reward when he's done x amount of study. It's feeding his head but it's not study
2. Routine
Your very best friend. Stick to your plan – no big breaks, surges in activity or sudden changes
3. Realism
The best student in the world will do better in some questions than in others on the day. Prepare as best you can but when the day comes you know what you know. You're playing a long game here. One unexpected question or weak answer will melt into the overall result so don't sweat the small stuff
Don't forget
PENSAnd back-up pens, more back-up pens. Experiment with different types over the next few weeks. Some will make your writing hand tired more quickly than others depending on the flow of the ink and your own writing style. Felt-tip, ballpoint, rollerpoint – they all have different actions and can alter your writing stamina and even legibility. Find which ones work for you and stock up
FINAL FOLDERSYou might be able to recycle older ones but I recommend getting slim subject folders to put your very last, concise, outside-the-exam-hall notes in to carry with you on the day. It's a calming object as well as a practical aid
PENCILS AND ERASERSVery useful for subjects where you have to draw diagrams or illustrations that you may have to edit.
WATER:I only recommend bringing a drink to the exam if you feel you need a lift. Go for Lucozade or something isotonic. Sweets and other food are distracting, you don't want a voice in the back of your head going "eat another" all through the exam.
