tips for the leaving cert.

iloveireland

ENGLISH you dont need to learn every poet.i would look at it now and pick which poets you think are going to come up.if your teacher tells you to learn lines from a poem do it will make it so much easier later on in the year.

HISTORY.YOU REALY DO HAVE TO LEARN YOUR SPECIAL TOPIC NOW.

ECONOMICS.i would definatly learn off the short questions.i would get a previous exam paper off one of your mates and learn off all the short questions.

sorry thats all really

alot of my friends said that the institute was very good and the notes were brilliant and i would go to it at christmas definatly.

another thing enjoy your weekends especially now at this time and i would reccomend the o zone they let you in if you have any decent fake id.

and everybody studies no matter what they say i found that out after the leaving cert.

i would also start up a predictions thread as early as possible.

d4gurl

note: history special topic is now pre submitted

Funkstard

.d

Scarinae

ENGLISH: Learn quotations from the play and your poets now or as early as possible, and maybe learn one or two from your comparative texts to impress the examiner
CHEMISTRY: Learn your definitions and have them words perfect. Seriously! And make sure you know the experiments well, being able to answer all three is really handy and it's easy to pick up marks this way
MATHS: Do as many questions as you can, it's the only way to learn

abercrombie

i hate the way chemistry is so exact! we had a chem inspector in our school about 2 weeks ago and she said that there was noway that it woz going to change!!!!

Pitseleh

Well this is how I did it and how I'd reccommend it - it's all about good preparation. Close to the ol' D-Day you shouldn't need textbooks - all you'll need are your own essays and notes on the morning of the exam. Well, maybe a paper bag in case of hyperventilation.... and a banana. Anyhoo...

English: Work from essays - don't learn quotes per se but rather in the context of an essay. For your Shakespeare/single text do essays on 3 main characters and 2 themes - condense and learn. Comparative - prepare 1 long essay with all three texts on 2 of the three topics and learn them. Poetry - study your favourite poets, learn a general essay and just adapt it in the exam.

Maths: Practice, practice, practice. Answer as many questions in as many papers as possible. Condense formulae/theorems to be proved into a few A4 sheets

French (any other European language too?): Learn the grammar thoroughly - all your verb endings etc. in present, past, conditional, future, imperfect (in order of importance). Then go for the past historic, imperative and subjunctive but they're of lesser importance really unless you're aiming for a tres bien grade.

History: Choose your topics now and work on 'em like a fox. The course has changed so I can't really comment.

Geography: Again, the course has changed but I'm sure the predictability of the topics hasn't diminished.

Chemistry: Effectively summarise the book into notes as many times as possible and just cram definitions' exact wording.

Physics: See chemistry - it condenses into a smaller volume (I got it into about 15-20 A4 (front and back) in the end). Learn formulae through continously doing problems. Cram proofs and definitions days before exams.

Well, here's my bus...

Funkstard

Great advice so far. If its anything like the Junior Cert, it'll be condense, revise, cram

abercrombie

Funkstard wrote:

Great advice so far. If its anything like the Junior Cert, it'll be condense, revise, cram

no cramming for me thanks very much...i'm starting to go over things now and sorta learn them! that way after christmas i can go over them again for the mocks and study them more and hopefully retain some info and then before the exams i won't be nervous as all the info will be swimming like happy fish in my brain ((wow i'm wierd!!!))

Funkstard

Haha, they all say that. Come May you'll be a wreck, sheets of paper flying everywhere, stuck inside your room all day shoving info into your brain.

I'm under no illusions as to what It'll be like.

Just imagine next summer. Just ****ing imagine the second you put down your pen for the last time, and then a few weeks later when you regain feeling in your righting hand.......

4Xcut

Na Fianníocht(sp?) or na Ruairíocht i Stair na Teanga on paper two.As always

abercrombie

omg i jst learned those 2 irish history things (plus 3 others) for a test 2moro!!! freaky

jetsonx

Funkstard wrote:

Great advice so far. If its anything like the Junior Cert, it'll be condense, revise, cram

I'd agree with some of that but in no way should you use your JC results as any sort of benchmark for what you get in LC. I knew loads of people who had a rake of A's and B's in Junior Cert. but mainly got C's in the LC.

Quinnsey

...and vice versa.

Funkstard

Touché

I didn't mean I'd get comparable results, but would end up doing comparable cramming.

I work best when cramming, so until March I'm fine. I'm also quite happy my school doesn't do mocks, thats like half the workload off there

d4gurl

Here is some advice even though I have not done the LC ( I'm just so cool, I can see into the future!) GET OF BOARDS.IE and the INTERNET that formula = PURE EVIL :P lighten up guys baby steps methinks!!

Creamy Goodness

make out flash cards.

it's what i did for geography.

have one topic (i.e glaciation) on one card, use trigger words which you can turn into sentences.

same idea but for languages. (to build vocab on certain topic ie. timpiste or smoking ban etc).

have english words on one side of the card, and have the irish/french/german/spanish on the other side. test yourself

abercrombie

Cremo wrote:

make out flash cards.

it's what i did for geography.

have one topic (i.e glaciation) on one card, use trigger words which you can turn into sentences.

same idea but for languages. (to build vocab on certain topic ie. timpiste or smoking ban etc).

have english words on one side of the card, and have the irish/french/german/spanish on the other side. test yourself

deadly idea!

Funkstard

Officially started revising tonight - Started doing notes in Physics and worked my way through some Maths revision exercises. I'm going to try a study plan and see how it goes.

I was reading the Irish paper and it had a thing on a girl who got 600 last year. She studied on average 5 hours a night during the week and 10 hours a day during the weekend. That is absolutely ridiculous, there's no need to do that much

Dave!

Exactly, it's a hard year, don't make it any harder than it has to be. Find out what points you need if you're goin to college, and then go through every subject, working out what you could get (be stingey). Then go through every section of every paper, and see where you will pick up marks and where you can afford to sacrifice some. That's what I did (albeit only in the last few weeks before the tests started, lol)

Scarinae

4Xcut wrote:

Na Fianníocht(sp?) or na Ruairíocht i Stair na Teanga on paper two.As always

As always? Neither came up this year, and lots of people were very pissed off. Bealoideas came up though, and that's very similar to Ruraiocht

abercrombie

but fianniocht and ruairiocht are basically the same aren't they???? just that they origionate from two diff parts of the country..i cud be wrong....:p

Funkstard

what the hell are na fianníoicht and na ruairíocht?

4Xcut

in higher irish you do a section called "Stair na Teanga" history of the language and they are two sections in it

abercrombie

Funkstard wrote:

what the hell are na fianníoicht and na ruairíocht?

fianníoicht is like stories about heros from ulster and ruairíocht is stories about heros and the likes from the east and south of the country

i think....

Funkstard

Oh, Aislings?

abercrombie

Funkstard wrote:

Oh, Aislings?

doesnt aisling mean dream???

Funkstard

Aren't Aislings the political poems written in Ulster and Munster in the 18th/19th century?

Usuall someone falls asleep, has a dream, a fairy/angel comes to him in his dream and askes him to come with her, but he can't leave his beloved Ireland. She begs him and begs him and promises him eternal happiness, but he can't go until his country is free?

Something like that. Thats what we learned last year. They were written by influential poets to rouse the people to stem the tide of Anglicisation that was happening

abercrombie

right....

i obviously havent got to that part yet!!!

tho i'll let you know when i do

Funkstard

well don't feel down, thats the ONLY thing we learnt in Irish last year. Our teacher was a former principal, absolute legend but he was in his last year before retiring and spent the year telling us stories about him, and quizzes on Friday! Great fun but I'm fuxed for Irish this year!

patzer117

Here's a tip: if you're doing 7 subjects or more at honours, drop down to ordinary Irish. You don't need honours to go to college or anything, and the effort you put into irish is worth so much more when you apply it to a different subject. Besides it's going to be the worst subject for most people anyway. Don't bother learning the fianniocht or ruraiocht or whatever, drop to pass and enjoy yourselves for God's sake. None of this 5 hourse per night lark as the Irish Times said a few days ago

Patzer

Funkstard

I've already started whittling down what I'll need to study, Art History is possibly the most choice you will find in an exam in the world. You have to do 3 questions out of 24!

In Irish history I'll be studying the Iron Age, monasteries/manuscripts and Newgrange. One of them absolutely has to come up because none were asked last year. I haven't gotten to European History yet, but Art Appreciation you don't even need to study for.

Madness. I also just spent €125 buying a rake of past papers, Less Stress More Success' and English novels/plays etc.