Rory Crean knew he’d need a top Leaving Cert to get into medicine, so he found a mentor who could help him. His first book, ‘How to Exceed Your Expectations in the Leaving Cert’, lets everyone in on the secret

W HEN RORY CREAN, a UCD medical student, was about to start his Leaving Cert year, in 2011, a college friend sat him down and helped him visualise the eight months between him and the exams, and how he was going to use them.

“She was in first-year medicine and had just been through the Leaving,” says Crean. “She didn’t tell me exactly what I needed to do to get straight As. What she did was prompt me to examine my approach to the Leaving, to explore what methods work for me, to make a plan and to stick to it.”

Thanks to that conversation, Crean put in a very productive sixth year and got straight As for his trouble. He spent much of last year writing exam tips for readers of The Irish Times. Crean has now written an ebook, How to Exceed Your Expectations in the Leaving Cert, which he hopes will act as a virtual mentor for the many students embarking on the Leaving Cert this year and in years to come.

“Not everyone will have the benefit of the mentor that I had, but I have tried to apply the same principles in this book. The idea is to share the strategies that worked for me, as well as offering alternatives for different learners. The fundamental objective is to help exam students visualise the year ahead and make a plan they can stick to in order to reach and exceed their expectations.”

“You may know exactly where you’ll be in 10 years, or you may not know where you’ll be in nine months, but you are working towards something,” says Crean. “Set yourself a target, like attaining X hundred points, getting into course Y or just going to college Z next year.”

“To flog the dead horse that is the marathon analogy, no one runs 26 miles without drive and motivation. The same applies to you. If there’s one thing this book should show you, it’s that the Leaving Cert is fair. If you play by the rules, get your prep work done and meet the clear deadlines long the way, you’ll give yourself every opportunity to outperform yourself come exam time.”

Here are some excerpts from Crean’s account of cracking the Leaving Cert.

Pick the right subjects

Bring your talents and experience into the classroom. Most of you will have a hobby or talent that you’ve been honing over the years. If you’re clever, you’ll find a way to bring those skills into the Leaving Cert and get marks for something that may require very little work. If you’re the kind of person who can paint or draw without ever having to correct mistakes, then art is an obvious choice. If you play any instrument or sing, or even have an interest in composition, then, again, music is the obvious choice. These are no-brainers; the artist should take art, and the musician, music. So where you can you apply other talents?

Bookworms may feel like they’re at a disadvantage, as English is a core subject anyway, but if you can cover a lot of text in a short period of time, then subjects like classics, geography or history should be at the top of your list. Few subjects give you the same room to flex your vocabulary muscles and, provided you match those muscles with accurate and relevant information, you could position yourself to do very well in essay-heavy subjects. Adding any kind of flair to your history or geography essay can make it stand out in a pile of bog-standard answers.

It’s not just your hobbies that you can bring into your schoolwork, either: it’s also your experiences. If you have any kind of farming background, agricultural science should be a nice fit, if only for a few chapters. If you hail from a business-orientated family, you should capitalise on the fact that you have a teacher on demand, in the form of a parent or sibling at home.

Playing to your strengths includes marrying your interests with your subjects. If you’re like me and like to know how day-to-day items operate, then the sciences will likely sate your curiosity.

Skip the honeymoon

Being ready from the get-go is essential if you want to get your head down early in the year. That means avoiding those honeymoon weeks after summer when you promise yourself you’ll organise your notes from last year tomorrow. Walk into school on the first day of term with your subjects chosen, your notes filed and your timetable drafted.

Timetable

There’s no point sugar-coating it: your timetable should be busy. If you want results, you have to be willing to put in the hours. The key to a good timetable is a definite structure that you can build up as the year goes on. As the exams draw nearer, you should be able to add hours here and there without ever feeling too overwhelmed.

If you haven’t already set out a plan, it’s quite simple. I worked in one-hour blocks: English, French and maths on a Monday; Irish, chemistry and geography on a Tuesday; and so on. Do this for your subjects until you’ve filled your weekdays with roughly equal amounts of time given to each subject. A good rule to keep in mind when divvying up the subjects is to balance the ones you like with the ones you don’t like as much. If you find history tough going but breeze through music, put them together in one night. Once you have the outline of a timetable, add an hour each night, giving special attention to those subjects that need a little extra work. The same applies to your weekend.

Assess yourself

Keeping a tab of your progress with each subject is essential, and is particularly key for getting to grips with subjects you find troublesome. I kept checklists for the topics in each subject. Then I’d find some past-paper questions that synced up with the chapter and test myself. If I wasn’t able to answer questions on a section, I’d allot another hour of my nightly timetable until I was happy that I had got to grips with the section.

It takes a little longer than sticking slavishly to a rigid schedule, but stick with it and you’ll bring all your subjects up to the same level.

Study methods

There are lots of ways of tackling study. Some people deface their textbooks with several shades of luminous yellow, highlighting anything they feel is important. Others pace around the room, repeating whatever it is they’re studying until it “goes in”. Then there are those, like me, who write it all out.

Rewriting notes

This was my method of studying simply because highlighting didn’t work for me.

I felt that if I wanted to prove to myself that I understood something, the only way I could do that was to write out whatever it was in my own words. It doesn’t matter if it’s coastal erosion, Einstein’s photoelectric effect or Shakespeare quotes: if you can’t walk out on to the street and explain it to a 10-year-old, there’s a good chance you won’t understand it when you return to it in a few months’ time.

Just remember that even if you take an active approach to note-taking in class, it is not a substitute for note-making at home. Firstly, you’re more likely to lose the sheets you write out in class; secondly, the point of making notes at home is to solidify what you’ve covered in class that day.

Outside the classroom

Pretty much everything covered so far has had a fairly obvious and practical application to school, note-making, subject choice, and so on. But a lot of people put all of that out of their heads once the school bell rings and their homework is done. I mentioned earlier that, when it comes to subject choice, a great tactic is to match your interests with your subjects. In that same spirit you can match what you like to do in your spare time with enjoyable aspects of each subject.

Read more

Every student knows there’s a lot of reading to be done. Textbooks are hundreds of pages long, and you’re going to end up reading, most of each book again near exam time.

Now you could spend a lot of time working out how to speed-read, or you could just read a bit more in your spare time. Keeping a book on the go for when you’re not studying is a great way to speed up how quickly you can read a page without it feeling like work.

The benefits it can have on your language subjects are also huge. Take English. In Paper 1, many people don’t really know what their style is and spend a lot of the year bouncing from personal essay to short story to discussion and just hoping that the lottery of essay titles on the day comes up in their favour.

What you read will hugely influence your style of writing, not to mention the creativity and ideas you’ll pick up.

As for Paper 2, reading in your spare time is a brilliant way to expand your vocabulary. You’re probably familiar with the PCLM1 marking scheme of English. In this marking scheme, language is hugely important, being weighted with nearly a third of the marks, so an extensive vocabulary is essential for getting the best mark possible here.

While reading may seem like it will only help you in your English exam, it bleeds into other subjects as well. Keeping up to date with the news, and reading opinions and analyses in the newspapers, can inform you when it comes to writing essays in Irish and other languages. Not to mention that exams these days desperately try to be modern and bang up to date. Big events during the year may very well influence the questions that come up in your exam. Geography is a great example, where a natural disaster from the year often comes up as a full question.

Watch, listen and learn

I love movies, so imagine my delight, early in sixth year, when I stumbled across a list of the best French films of the decade. After that I’d make sure that one of my two weekly films was in French. If you’re studying a language, that’s something you could think about doing too. Whether you choose to keep subtitles on or off is up to you: the important thing is that you’re getting an ear for the language and the accent. I studied French, so French films are the ones I know best. My top three would have to be La Haine, Amélie and Caché. While films were the best for me, maybe you prefer television series or music.

The point is to research what you like and get into a routine. Watch a show or two a week, listen to a foreign album on your iPod on your way into school or do all three.

How to Exceed Your Expectations in the Leaving Cert, published as an ebook by Penguin Ireland, is available on all ebook retail sites