The people who correct your paper write down, in public, what students keep getting wrong and how the marks are actually awarded. Almost nobody reads it. That's the whole opportunity.
After each exam cycle the State Examinations Commission publishes a Chief Examiner's Report for a subject. It sets out how candidates performed, what the examiners saw working, and specific advice for students and teachers preparing for the next sitting.
It is, in other words, the marking authority telling you what it rewards — written down, free, and largely ignored. Twenty minutes with the report for your weakest subject is among the best-value study you will do all year.
The reports cover very different subjects, but read a few and the same instructions come back around. These ten appear again and again, from Maths to Home Economics to Irish.
The single most repeated point. Where there's no choice on the paper, a gap is simply lost marks; where there is choice, a gap narrows your options until you're forced into questions you didn't want.
Examiners say plainly that many candidates fail to do this. Learn the command words — discuss, analyse, explain, justify, give an account — because each one asks for a different thing, and answering the wrong one loses marks even when the content is right.
A twenty-mark part generally wants four or five distinct points, not one point stretched over a page. The allocation is an instruction, not a hint.
In several subjects, full marks aren't available without supporting work — and a wrong answer with a sound method can still earn credit, where a bare wrong answer earns nothing.
Leaving parts blank is named repeatedly as a reason grades come in below what a candidate was capable of. Attempt it even when you're not sure — an attempt at a sensible strategy attracts marks.
Invaluable close to the exam. Relied on too early, they narrow what you've learned and leave you stuck when a question arrives in an unfamiliar form. And marking schemes are not exhaustive: they show key phrases, not the only acceptable answer.
The syllabus asks you to solve problems in unfamiliar contexts, so the paper would be failing its job if you recognised all of it. The less familiar the ground, the more credit is available for a sensible attempt.
Subjects are taught in sections and examined across them. Questions routinely need material from more than one area at once, and students who compartmentalise struggle exactly there.
Start each question on a new page, number the parts, keep the work legible. One line through a mistake — never scribble it out or use correction fluid, because visible work can still be credited. Use diagrams and charts; they often say more than a paragraph, faster.
If you finish early, go back and check. In Maths in particular, know the units, the required accuracy and the rounding — those are marks lost for nothing, by students who knew the material perfectly well.
The Maths report is the one I know best, having taught Higher Level since 1992 and corrected the papers.
Its advice is unglamorous and correct. Practise the basic skills — computation, algebraic manipulation, calculus — until they're automatic, and be careful with signs, powers and the order of operations, because that's where accurate students lose marks they've earned. Know your way around the Formulae & Tables booklet, so you're not hunting through it under pressure. Get comfortable with the geometric instruments. Have an estimate of the answer before you work it out, so an absurd result announces itself.
And the point people underrate: candidates should be able to describe, explain and justify. You don't need learned-off definitions, but you do need to state things clearly — and that is directly examinable.
The reports are published free by the State Examinations Commission at examinations.ie, under the examination material archive. Look for the Chief Examiner's Report for your subject and level — they aren't published every year for every subject, so take the most recent one available.
Reports exist across both cycles:
If you read one thing from the list above, make it the command words. More marks are lost to answering a slightly different question than the one asked than to not knowing the material.
That's the one we teach — weekly grinds in Kilkenny and online, every session recorded, Mathslive notes included. And if the problem is finding anywhere to work, that's what evening study is for.
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