In May this year, TJ Hegarty was invited on to RTE to give tips for people studying for the Leaving Cert exams. He spoke about the importance, the final tips and tricks to use the night before, the morning of your exams, and where students should focus most on.

The piece appeared on RTE’s social media channels (Instagram, TikTok, Facebook) and on their website.

The Leaving Cert maths exam is a marathon. It’s two papers covering 37 maths topics, and over the last few years the exams have got a lot more wordy.

Students really struggle with the complexity of the exam, the density of the exam papers. It can feel like a real marathon effort. And with new developments of Project Maths and the way they’re trying to make the maths questions into more real-life problems, the questions are getting more complex to understand, in my opinion.

On the feature, I spoke about a couple of things that students can do now for the final week of their preparation. The first thing that I spoke about was focusing on the core topics rather than trying to learn absolutely everything. So, for Paper 1, it would be focusing a lot more on differentiation and algebra, and for Paper 2, it would be focusing a lot more on statistics and trigonometry.

The next thing I spoke about was getting yourself into maths mode. It’s really important that students in the final lead-up to exams are testing themselves constantly rather than reading notes. It gets their head into maths mode. They get accustomed to exam questions, and they’re sharper on the day of the exam.

The final thing I told my students was, just the morning of the exam, to look at the formulas that are not in their logbook. That should be the last thing they see before they walk into the exams: a list of those formulas so they’re top of their brain and they go into the exam fresh with them on their brain.

I really think this is the key point for maths. Just before the exams, a lot of students make the mistake of just reading over notes. What brilliant students do is they focus on examining themselves, testing themselves, and they go into that exam in maths mode, far sharper for the actual cut and thrust of the exam itself.

One of the mistakes students make a lot before they leave and start maths exams is they try to learn absolutely everything. This is a mistake. Instead, I would focus on just learning the core topics that would anchor both paper one and paper two, and that stops students getting overwhelmed.

An awful lot of students will ask me in the lead up to exams, “Should I drop down now, or is it too late to drop down?”

I understand where students are coming from. However, I do feel that students panic a bit at this stage. I think they get a bit overwhelmed.

If you really are in this boat, the best advice I can give you is to talk to your parents and make a decision before you drop down the day before the actual exam. Because then at least it’s not a rash decision done on the day. At least you’ve thought it through and spoken to people about it and got out of your own head.

I mentioned this in the RTÉ feature. Higher level maths is worth 25 extra bonus points for a reason. It’s going to be a challenging exam, and it can overwhelm students. I think that’s the big thing about higher level maths: it overwhelms. If you can comprehend complexity and navigate things that you’re unsure about, you’ll do well in the exam, and higher level maths then is worth the effort for the points alone.

In the lead-up to the exams, we usually run a Masterclass the night before the exams, so we do this before Paper 1 of the Leaving Cert maths exam (Higher Level), and we’ll do one before Leaving Cert maths Paper 2.

And if you do need a hand, last-minute before the maths exams, this night-before-exams Masterclass is always really popular and makes a big difference to students’ grades.

You can watch the RTÉ feature here and tune in to my advice before you even start.