How to treat the mocks - a life saver

An excellent article appeared in the Irish Times by Brian Mooney on how to treat the Mocks. It could be your life saver.

Don't throw it all away - your mock exam papers that is. They can tell you more about the gaps you need to fill before the State exams this summer than anything else.

At the end of the mock examination process, you will have the most valuable resource possible in the form of the corrected scripts returned to you. These will help you to improve your results in the State examinations in June. Many of you will simply deposit these scripts deep in your school bag, where they will never see the light of day again. If you take this course of action, your mocks have been of little real value to you.

Your corrected scripts are a road map to your best possible result in June. They contain within them all of the evidence of what you did well and what you did badly.

YOUR CORRECTED MOCK EXAM SCRIPTS WILL TELL YOU

* Where you allocated time appropriately to each section of each question
* Where you addressed the question asked, or where you drifted into writing irrelevant material which only had some loose association with the question.
* Where nerves and stress led you to answer poorly, when a more careful approach could have paid rich dividends.
* How prepared you are to meet the standard of answering required in June.
* To conclude, how you analyse the feedback you receive will determine whether your mocks act as a catalyst for a greatly improved performance in June or are a wasted opportunity.

HOME ECONOMICS SOCIAL AND SCIENTIFIC

* Study the following topics in detail: proteins, lipids, vitamins and minerals, carbohydrates and water.
* Food commodities: alternative proteins (their nutritive and dietetic value), meat, poultry, fish, eggs, milk and milk products, cereals, nuts, fruit and vegetables, fats and oils.
* Food labelling, food preservation, food additives, food hygiene, and food safety. National Agencies for food study/food hygiene legislation (HACCP) ISO 9000.
* Household technologies, large and small appliances.
* Consumer studies and consumer laws, components of management (inputs, outputs and throughputs).
* Types of mortgage, forms of credit and savings schemes.
* With regard to your chosen elective, practise past paper questions and check your answer against the marking schemes available on www.examinations.ie
* Finally, practise both short and long questions, on past examination papers.

GEOGRAPHY

* Practise previous examination questions and use the State Examination Commission marking schemes to check the quality of your work.
* Core questions: In answering these questions ensure that you are able to refer to appropriate case studies at both national and international levels.
* Attempt all of the short questions, as you will be marked out of your best eight.
* In physical geography study a “landform question”.
* Study the three topics of rivers, seas and glaciers. You must study one of them in detail and prepare a case study of the human interaction with that topic.
* Memorise regional geography, primary, secondary and tertiary activities.
* Ensure that you are able to identify all surface landforms by name or from a diagram.
* Elective questions: At the beginning of fifth year, you will have chosen either human or economic geography as your elective. If you have chosen human geography, you should revise population as overpopulation is a commonly occurring topic.
* Settlement: Settlement patterns – site, situation, function, map and photograph skills are other topics you should be familiar with.
* Optional geography question: This is an essay-type question for higher-level students. Practise writing a number of appropriate essays in your chosen optional area. You will be working on one of the following topics in your geography class in school: geo-ecology, global interdependence, culture and identity, and the atmosphere-ocean environment. Ensure that you have a clear structure to your work, which deals with three to four aspects of the topic and identify seven to eight significant relevant points on each aspect.
* The written paper makes up 80 per cent of the overall marks. Leaving Certificate geography students have until April to complete their Geographical Investigation, which will be assessed outside the written examination.

HISTORY

* Ensure that you complete your work on the research topic as soon as possible.
* Develop a regular pattern of revision- at least four 40-minute sessions weekly.
* Draw up outline plans for all of the essays you are preparing.
* You should now be at the stage where you can write full essays in approximately 40 minutes, without the use of textbooks or notes.
* Prepare answers for a possible contextualisation question in the documents section of the examination paper.
* At this stage, it is often not possible to revise every topic. Ensure that the topics you do revise are done in some detail. For example if you are revising Home Rule within Irish history, you need to cover every aspect of the topic.

BIOLOGY

Familiarise yourself with the structure of the paper and the application of the marking scheme.

Short questions

Practise the short questions on both past exam papers and on sample papers.

Experiments

Revise all of the experiments you have done in fifth and sixth year, which will be examined in section B of the paper.

Long questions

* Go back over the definitions you have learnt and practise writing them out.
* Always be careful to ensure that you are addressing the question asked.
* Plant biology is a section of the course you should study carefully.
* You should consider answering questions 14 and 15 as they will offer you choices within the question.
* Practise drawing the diagrams you have studied and ensure that you label them accurately.
* Concentrate on the following topics: ecology, respiration, genetics, plant structure and body systems.

PHYSICS AND APPLIED MATHS

There is an excellent website physics students can use in their revision – www.thephysicsteacher.ie. The site also provides excellent revision materials for students studying applied maths.

CHEMISTRY

* Ensure that you are completely familiar with the practical questions you have studied to date.
* The organic chemistry section of the course is regularly examined and should therefore feature prominently in your revision schedule over the coming weeks.
* If you are considering attempting question four, which contains 11 short questions, you may find that this is a relatively easy question if you have a good overview of the entire course.
* You have been accumulating detailed records of your laboratory experiment work over the past two years. Revise this work fully prior to your mocks.

FRENCH

Timing

As with all exams, the mock gives you the chance to fine-tune how long you spend on each question. Practise this by answering a reading comprehension or one of the past paper essay questions and seeing how long it takes for you to finish it.

Aural

Practise the past papers. Go back over sections and identify vocabulary that is repeated. Add this to your notes. Practise the past papers again. If you’re sick of listening to past papers, go to you tube, type in “entretien francais”, and watch a chat with some French celebrities. This helps get your ear in for the oral too.

Oral

Even if your school doesn’t have a mock oral, this is still a good time to revise for it. Remember, it won’t be long before you’ll be sitting the oral proper.

Revise all the topics your teacher has given you and go back through your documents. Remember the more often you read and write the vocabulary, the better your chances of remembering it. Try recording yourself and picking out your mistakes.

Reading comprehensions

Know what the questions mean. Learn off the required vocabulary you’ve got from your teacher. Don’t leave gaps. A guess is better than nothing.

Written work:

Look back over your vocabulary notes. Tenses are important here too. Revise the present, past, subjunctive, future and conditional tenses. Make up sentences to practise the topics and vocabulary that your teacher has given you.

* You might take a look at skoool.ie and read over their study notes. Check out www.s-cool.co.uk/alevel/french/writing.html too. It’s for the British A Level, but has some notes that are relevant to the Leaving Cert.
* www.languagesonline.org.uk/ is for A levels also, but will correct your answers for you.

BUSINESS

* Ensure that you read the business pages of the national newspapers so that you stay abreast of the current business environment. This will enable you to draw on examples of current practice from the world of business in your answers.
* Financial ratios, such as profitability and liquidity, are regular question on both mock and Leaving Certificate papers. Revise these, so that in answering this question you will be able to propose a course of action that the business should follow, based on your ability to calculate the correct ratios.
* A question on marketing is a hardy annual on business papers. Revise global marketing, market segmentation, product life cycle and breakeven analysis.
* Use bullet points in all your answers. Take note of the number of marks offered per question. A 20-mark question should have five key points in the answer, supported by relevant examples.
* You should practise answering full questions in 30 minutes so that you can maximise your performance. If you write beyond this time limit, you will not complete the required number of questions.

PREPARING FOR ORAL EXAMINATIONS

The most important aspect of preparation for oral examinations is to be comfortable about a range of topics or issues that an examiner might raise with you or allow you to introduce. The only way you can do this is by practising discussing the issues outlined below in the appropriate language with a fellow student or a person with fluency in the language in question.

Typical topics include:

* Yourself, your family, where you live, your past times or hobbies.
* Sport: your participation in sporting activities, your sporting achievement (real or imagined), your interest in sport.
* Your school, the facilities on offer, your friends, the subjects you are studying and what you like most about your school.
* Things you did during your holidays, over the past year or things you plan to do once you complete your Leaving Certificate in June.
* Your plans for the future, colleges or courses you are interested in or plans you may have to travel.
* Your hopes for the Leaving Certificate, the points you are aiming for and how you are preparing for the exams.
* Current Affairs: It is important, given the current economic crisis to be able to discuss your views on major world or national issues.

PREPARING FOR AURAL EXAMINATIONS

You can improve your performance in the aurals by listening to past papers on the CDs, which are readily available. You need to focus on the key question forms, such as when, how, and what etc.

To enable you easily to identify words that are in regular use, you should familiarise yourself with key vocabulary.

The following are some of the areas you should be familiar with: counties, countries, towns and cities, months, time, numbers, occupations, academic subjects, types of schools and vocabulary relevant to the CAO college admissions process and job applications.

• Acknowledgment: I would like to thank my teaching colleagues in Oatlands College, Mount Merrion, Dublin for their tremendous support, in writing and preparing the subject content of these mock examination articles – Brian Mooney

Writing is on the wall for spelling

In the Education section of today's Irish Independent

If you are a fuddy-duddy traditionalist, upset that 'doughnut' is now commonly spelled as 'donut' by young whipper-snappers, then look away now.
Standardised spelling, if such a thing ever existed, seems to be in decline in Irish schools and colleges. And some people want to dump old-fashioned English spelling completely.

Martin O'Grady, lecturer in psychology at Tralee Institute of Technology, says the standard of spelling and grammar of Irish students at third-level colleges now leaves a lot to be desired.
Recently he has come across students referring to corporal punishment as 'corporate punishment', bonfire as a 'bombfire', and many students don't know the difference between 'their' and 'there'.

Last year the Department of Education's chief examiner lamented the disintegration of basic grammar and spelling skills on display in Junior Cert English papers.
Recent surveys in Britain suggest that around half of adults are unable to spell commonly-used words such as 'embarrassed', 'liaison' or 'millennium'.
More than a quarter of those surveyed struggled to spell 'definitely', 'accidentally' and 'separate'. One in three was not confident enough to fill in an application form without resorting to a dictionary or spell-checker.

There is no reason to suggest that we are any more literate here.
So, is it time to make spelling simpler? Should the English and Irish simply follow the example of Portugal, which recently simplified its spelling system.

Back in the 19th century, an American dictionary compiler, Noah Webster, set out to simplify the spelling of certain English words. His revisions led to American spellings such as 'color', 'center', 'favor', and 'traveler'.

Now there is more talk of reforming the complicated spelling system of the English language. This time, the reformers are mostly English.
A group of teachers and scholars has called for an end to difficult spellings such as 'receipt', 'through', 'cough' and 'scissors'.

The Spelling Society estimates that €25m is wasted every year in Britain teaching archaic 15th century spellings to 21st century schoolchildren.
Dr John Gledhill, secretary of the Spelling Society, told The Guardian: "If we simplified many of the difficult current English spellings by letting them follow basic English spelling rules, the English language would not change in any way, but English spelling would become easier to learn and easier to teach.
"More people would become literate and confident about writing, and children would have more time to learn many other useful things -- and to play.''

The Spelling Society is merely following the example of the Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw, who claimed that the retention of archaic English spellings was merely a wicked plot to keep the poor illiterate. Shaw highlighted the absurdities of English spelling by explaining how the made-up word "ghoti'' should be pronounced "fish''. Why "fish''?
- The "gh'' as in laugh,
- The "o'' as in women,
- The "ti'' as in motion.
The Dubliner left £1m and the royalties from his plays to the cause of rationalising English spelling, but somehow his new alphabet (or alfabet) never caught on.

Shaw was also dismissive of those who insisted on proper punctuation. Referring to the use of apostrophes, he said there was "not the faintest reason for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of peppering pages with these uncouth bacilli''.

Textspeak is commonly blamed for a perceived decline in standards of spelling and grammar among youngsters. The Chief Examiner's report for Junior Cert English, published last year, said: "The emergence of the mobile phone and the rise of text messaging as a popular means of communication would appear to have impacted on standards of writing as evidenced in the responses of candidates."

The Chief Examiner argued that textspeak was causing Junior Cert pupils to become "unduly reliant" on short sentences, simple tenses and a limited vocabulary.
He said text-messaging posed a "threat to traditional conventions in writing" because of its use of phonetic spelling and lack of punctuation.
The harrumphing BBC presenter John Humphrys was more blunt in his denunciation of text messagers, describing them as "vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours 800 years ago''.

Text messaging may be an easy target, but recent research suggests that it may actually improve literacy rather than reduce it.

In a study for the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, researchers at Coventry University found that 12-year-olds who used textspeak improved their "word reading, vocabulary and phonological awareness''.
There may be much hand-wringing about spelling and grammar, but John White, General Secretary of ASTI, says there is no such thing as standardised English spelling.
"English spelling is changing all the time. The spelling of words is quite different now to what it was during the time of Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift. There has been a big scare about text messaging, but the important thing is that language is appropriate for the setting.
"You would not use legal language in a love letter, and text language may not be appropriate for certain types of writing, but that does not mean that it is wrong.''
John White, a former English teacher, says it should be acknowledged that the way we spell words changes. But he says any attempt to reform the current spelling system would be doomed to failure.

Sean Byrne, lecturer in Economics at Dublin Institute of Technology, says the major problem is not poor spelling.
"Many students do not know how to express themselves clearly. Pupils at second level seem to spend to less time writing essays and reading.
"Instead they are giving factual answers to questions in exams. That is regrettable, because good writing is a skill that is needed in most workplaces.''
- Kim Bielenberg

Record demand hits college points hopes

Todays headline in the Irish Independent on the eve of the Leaving Cert Exams

A RECORD number of applications for college places has hit hopes of a dramatic fall in entry points for major courses.

A total of 68,300 students are chasing about 40,000 places in the autumn, according to new figures from the Central Applications Office (CAO).

The figures were disclosed as more than 50,000 students prepare to sit their Leaving Certificate examinations on Wednesday.

The final total will represent an increase of 2,500 on last year and will sharpen competition for some high-points courses such as law, medicine and dentistry.

The numbers taking the Leaving are up by more than 1,000 on last year and most have applied to the CAO for college places.

Apart from more Leaving Cert applicants, there are also extra applications from adults this year. And more students are applying from Further Education colleges with Post Leaving Certificate qualifications. There is also a small rise in the number of overseas applicants.

But John McGinnity, assistant registrar with the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, said students should not be alarmed by the effect on points of the 2pc rise in Leaving Cert applicants.

"It's hard to predict," he said. "But the increase is a reminder to students not to take it for granted that points will be lower this year. They should put in the effort and do the best they can."

The CAO reports 67,810 applications to date and a further 500 or so are expected by the end of the 'offer season'.

These will come from existing college students who want to transfer to another college course and from new applicants for late vacancies which inevitably arise in hard-to-fill courses.

The CAO system has been operating since 1977 and the previous highest number of applicants was four years ago, when 66,222 people applied for places.

Older

Among this year's applicants is a high number of older adults, including people who have retired. Statistics obtained by the Irish Independent show that last year there were 265 full-time and 474 part-time students in our universities and teacher training colleges over 60 years of age -- up from 236 and 418 the previous year.

In the Institute of Technology sector, there were 84 full-time and 81 part-time students in the 60-plus age bracket. While many are in their 60s, there are groups of students in their 70s and even into their 80s taking courses at present.

The most popular subject choices tend to be history, fine arts, archaeology, religion and English. The Higher Education Authority said that there are 10,500 people aged 30 and over studying full-time in our higher education institutions. Many are returning to education to boost their career prospects.

- John Walshe Education Editor