Keep your cool

Don’t freak out if you can’t answer a question. Every year, students see a question they haven’t encountered before and think they can’t answer it. Take a deep breath and tell yourself that you know the answer, you put in the work and you can do it! If you start to get worked up in the exam, then you could ruin your mindset for other questions. Remember that even if the question looks new or scary, it’s likely you’ve answered something very similar before, so relax, read it and highlight the key information.

Nail your definitions

It’s also essential that you know as many definitions as possible for different topics, for example define genetic engineering, define photosynthesis, etc. If you’re finding this hard, perhaps you could take a look at any set of definitions which you don’t know and break them up into their various parts and write them out. This way you can ensure that you get as many marks as possible from the all important definition questions.

Ignore unnecessary material

I wouldn’t recommend doing all your study from your biology textbook, especially in the final few hours. The textbook has copious amounts of extra, unnecessary information that isn’t required on the syllabus. This could fill spaces in your brain that could be used more efficiently on remembering other vital pieces of information. Instead, working from past exam papers and your own notes, you should condense your study to what’s relevant for your exam – not what’s included in your book. But how do you know which parts of the textbook are needed or not? There are a couple of ways of knowing. For one, the past exam papers say a lot. Usually, they go as far back as about 10 years ago and, as I’ve said, the same stuff comes up the whole time. So if you study everything that you see in questions in the exam papers, you should be fairly safe.

Know your experiments

Questions on the practical experiments come up every year, so you need to know all of them. Again, the same type of questions regarding each experiment come up each year. So look at the exam papers to see what you must know about each experiment. Usually, you must know three to four steps of the experiments, a safety precaution, an aseptic technique, the equipment needed, the ‘ingredients’ needed, what they do and you must also be able to draw a diagram of the experiment also, which doesn’t have to be a work of art. Having a good working knowledge of the general laboratory techniques and safety precautions can help make sure you get the highest mark possible.

The above advice is courtesy of study website Studyclix. Irish Country Living has teamed up with studyclix.ie to offer last-minute help to Leaving Cert students the night before their exams.