Leaving Cert Exam Diary: February
Follow Missy.ie writer, Sophie Coffey, as she navigates the 2020 Leaving Certificate month-by-month. In part 6, Sophie shares her February Leaving Cert Exam Diary.
6 months down, 3 to go (This gets scarier to type every single time!)
Mocks on the clocks
February brought with it the infamous mocks. Two weeks of scribbling my name onto coloured exam booklets and throwing facts and figures onto pages hoping desperately that I hadn’t just made up these answers entirely.
Never did I imagine before these mocks began that I would refer to an Irish paper two question about the treatment of single mothers in Ireland in the 1960s as “lovely” but somehow this month I did just that! Admittedly I was somewhat less enamoured by the maths paper two question referring to last year’s Heathrow drone scare as a means for testing my trigonometry and geometry knowledge. Typically, when the topic ends in -ometry, said knowledge is rather limited! Some exams of course went better than others. I can only hope my not disastrous business paper makes up for my ferocious use of my rubber during maths papers one and two.
However at least (and long last) they are over! Now just the minor hurdle of the LC itself to pass.
Midterm has arrived
I spent midterm in a blissful haze of doing nothing and not feeling remotely guilty for it. For the past few weeks any time I sat down to do anything that wasn’t study (something I probably did too often!) there was this guilt in my mind that I ought to be revising something. I’ve really taken on board the advice to relax over the break and aside from a couple of mind-numbing hours memorising Irish sraith pictúirs (the mocks orals take place after midterm) I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the week off.
Disappearing Days
Everyone says this next part of the year flies by and with less than three months until my graduation day it’s not hard to imagine. In the coming weeks and months many of us will come closer and closer to finishing courses across our various subjects and tying up loose ends of 5th year chapters. This time last year the mocks seemed like a far-off impossibility never mind the Leaving Cert itself and yet somehow I am sitting and typing this with exactly 100 days until my first exam. Sorry to scare everyone else in the same boat!
Preparado, listo, ya! (ready set go)
The next few weeks are focussing in on the orals before the run in to Easter. The real orals take place the two weeks before Easter with foreign languages scheduled for one week and our “beloved” Irish planned for either the previous or following week depending on where in the country you are. Thankfully St Patrick’s day does give us a bit of break midway through this half of the term and something tells me we’ll need it!
Top tip for February: Listening to podcasts or tv shows and movies in your academic languages will help with your accent for the orals. This might be the only time watching tv counts as study.
Catch up on all of Sophie’s Exam Diaries.