With the mock exams now over, Leaving Certificate students across the country are taking stock of their results. Some may be feeling disappointed or anxious about the months ahead, while others are relieved but trying to figure out how to keep that momentum going until June.
The good news is, there’s still around 15 weeks to go until the first exam kicks off.
To find out how to best use that time, The Irish Times spoke to three friends who graduated from Maynooth Post Primary School last year and all achieved more than 600 points in their Leaving Cert.
They share the study strategies and routines that helped them succeed and get their top courses.
RM Block
Tim Murphy
(Tim achieved 625 points in his Leaving Cert and now is in his first year studying engineering at Trinity College Dublin)
Exam question, correct, repeat: “I was very maths oriented, I did maths, applied maths, physics and chemistry,” Tim says. “The technique for all of them was pretty much the same, just hammering through exam questions.
“I’d see what I got wrong, and I’d make notes, not detailed notes, but writing down things I got wrong and the things that I don’t know.”
Tim would then keep the sheet of paper of things he didn’t know, and use this as his study notes.
Keep a definitions copy: For physics and chemistry, Tim had a notebook filled with definitions that may be asked on the exam, with the word in green and the definition in black beside it. “You can hand the copy to anyone and say, ‘I have the word in green and the definition in black next to it, you say three green words and I’m going to say the black bit’.”
Tim would memorise the definitions by “constantly saying them out loud, reading them again and again, or running through them in the head”.
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With friends in class, “we’d kind of just throw the odd definition at each other at random times throughout the day”.
If you know one of your subjects won’t count, don’t waste time on it: Tim decided that English would be his ‘seventh subject’, as the CAO only considers your top six scoring subjects when calculating your points.
“I looked up the minimum requirement to get into Trinity, you needed to get a H7. I needed 30 per cent on that exam.”
Because of this, Tim spent less time focusing on English, and more time studying his other subjects.
Grinds: For students that can afford it, grinds can be a good way to improve your mark in a subject you’re struggling in.
“The style of the German teacher in the Institute [of Education] worked better for me,” says Tim. “The teacher broke it down very methodically, and I just learned to the exam. My German now is not great German, but it’s Leaving Cert German. I knew what I needed to know, and not much more.”
Turn your notes into a podcast: To prepare for his English exam, Tim placed his pdf notes into Notebook LM, Google’s AI tool.
“One of the features I liked the most was it can do an audio overview, so a podcast essentially, only talking about the notes that you gave. I thought that was great.”
Block social media apps from your phone: Tim used Forest, an app that helps you stay off your phone by growing a virtual tree while you concentrate on work, rewarding uninterrupted focus time.
“I had a few friends using it as well, so we could see how long we each had the phones locked down for, so there was a little bit of competition.”
Dominika Jablokov
(Dominika got 602 points in the Leaving Cert and is in her first year studying physiotherapy at The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland)
Get familiar with the marking schemes: Similar to Tim’s notebook of definitions, Dominika created a notebook of answers based on previous marking schemes.
“The first thing I did for biology was analyse all the marking schemes from 2004 to 2024, and I created a book of exam answers that would fit every single question up until then. So I could sit any exam, and if I had the answers that I created, I would have gotten full marks on the marking scheme”, Dominika says.
Students can view exam marking schemes at examinations.ie
Use a whiteboard for active recall: Rather than passively rereading notes, active recall requires you to retrieve information from memory, similar to what you need to do in an exam.
To memorise marking schemes, Dominika created questions and wrote the answers to them on a whiteboard, without looking at her notes.
She used the same technique for memorising geography essays. “I split them up into sections, and then I would rewrite those sections over and over again” on a whiteboard.
YouTube videos can help explain complex maths equations: “Maths is one of those subjects that you need to put a lot of time into, and you need to just keep repeating questions over and over again”, says Dominika. “The understanding has to be there, you have to go through it step by step, because if you’re missing any of the puzzle pieces, you won’t be able to do the question.”
“I didn’t have the money for grinds,” she says. “For maths, it was very useful watching YouTube videos.”
Dominika also cites the website jkmaths.net as a useful resource for Leaving Cert maths students.
Stay active: Many fifth or sixth year students give up sports and other hobbies to focus on their study. For Dominika, this was not an option.
“I do elite gymnastics, so I train five or six days a week, four hours a day, and I refused to give it up during the Leaving Cert”, she says. “I kind of just refused to quit in terms of the principle of it, because if I managed to get that many points and I haven’t quit, then I’ll have proven that it’s possible to continue training, and you don’t have to give up your sport to do well in the Leaving Cert.”
Because of this, the bulk of Dominika’s study took place on the weekend, but the hours she lost to training during the week allowed her to be more intentional with her study. “Because of training, all of the study I would do would be very focused study. I was motivated to study because of training.”
While five to six days of training is obviously above average for students, Dominika says a hobby can help students keep their mental health steady during the intense two years of study.
“I find a lot of peace in just going to training, and I have all my friends in training as well. So I think my mental health was never bad during the last two years. I always had loads of energy. I was always in a really good mood.”
Don’t let your mock results get you down: “In the mocks, I got 520 points, at that point I was quite disappointed with my results,” Dominika says.
However, she kept up her consistent study and maintained the same routine, rather than pushing herself harder to get better results.
“I didn’t change anything from the mocks until the Leaving Cert and the points jumped up. So I think the mocks are not the most accurate indicator of how well you’re going to do.”
Charlotte Favre d’Echallens
(Charlotte got 602 points in her Leaving Cert and is a first year Law and French student at Trinity)
Break down long essays into digestible pieces: Charlotte broke history essays down into paragraphs on flashcards, and would highlight the important words in each paragraph to remember.
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“I would just know the important words, my teachers would say if you had a specific date missing in a paragraph, you could write around that,” she says. “If I had an essay to learn, or if I had a poem to learn, I would highlight different things in different colours so that I could digest the page easier. It wasn’t just all black text”, she added.
Allow yourself to take guilt-free breaks from studying: “Giving myself time to not study and do nothing, and then not feel guilty about it,” was important for Charlotte.
“I’d give myself a whole hour to do whatever I wanted, so my study was more purposeful”, rather than staying distracted by “spending every five minutes on TikTok,” she says.
Make studying a social hangout: “I liked studying outside of my bedroom,” says Charlotte. “I would go to a cafe or the library, and I studied with my friends, but we would study at different tables, so it was nice. It was studying, there was also kind of a social element.”
It’s not too late to get started: Charlotte started taking study more seriously when she realised the orals were coming up in March.
“It was the Easter holidays, which was in April, that I did all the notes that I had to know, everything was kind of written out, so I had a whole month to just learn everything off,” she says.
“Of course, I was studying before that, but when I started really going for it was March and April [of sixth year].”
Give it your best shot: While it may feel like sixth year will never end, it’ll go by sooner than you think. You don’t want to look back on these months and wish you did more.
“Give it your all now,” says Charlotte. “It’s not the end of the world, it’s going to be over soon enough.”
