Top tips

Making best use of the last 24 hours

1 Make sure that you practise correcting your own questions, using the past marking schemes available on www.examinations.ie.

2 You do not need to study new material at this stage. It is far more important to organise the information you do have into short points which can be used in answering questions.

3 Do not burn yourself out by hours of late night study. Get in a few hours of preparation each night in reviewing the next day's papers, and give yourself an hour's work the next morning if you feel the need to go through them once more.

4 Organise your study according to how the papers fall on the timetable. You can leave the subjects that fall in week two and three until you get the Irish, English and maths papers out of the way this week.

5 Working with friends can be very useful in preparing questions if each of you presents specimen answers to the group, which are photocopied for each member. General group study sessions are useless and a waste of time.

6 Many questions are very predictable, if not in exact content, then certainly within very narrow parameters.

Know the structure of every paper you are facing.

If there are formulae that regularly come up, list them on a revision card, read it carefully outside the examination hall and write them quickly into the rough work section of your answer book immediately you are given the paper.

7 Never ever succumb to the temptation to bring notes into the examination hall.

The stress induced by such conduct will hugely affect your capacity to perform well, quite apart from the fact that you are most likely to be caught and thus you will have your entire paper cancelled.

8 Always read the paper fully before attempting any question. Decide on which questions you are going to attempt and map out the structure of your answer on the rough work page of your answer book.

Only then should you attempt the question you feel most comfortable with. As you answer each question, missing pieces of your mapped out answers will pop into your mind. Simply write them into your rough work page and continue with the question in hand.

9 Never leave the examination hall before the examination is over. Re- read each answer if you are finished. There will always be additional information you can add. Over the period of the entire Leaving Certificate/Junior Certificate, such a strategy can be worth an additional 15 to 20 points.

10 Finally, remember it is only an examination. Its results do not have any effect on how much your parents love and care for you. No matter how well or badly you do, there are opportunities in a wide range of careers and courses which will start you on the career path of life and which will have many more twists and turns in it before you finish.

Compiled by Brian Mooney