So you’ve just sat down to start studying, what happens next? It’s a Monday and now 5pm has come around you check your timetable and find you’ve planned to study The Renaissance and The Periodic Table for example.

The mechanics of the next following steps are really crucial so listen up. These guidelines fit best subjects such as Geography, Science, History, Religion and Business. First of all you should have all this covered in class and it’s really important to ask your teacher questions throughout the lesson especially in complicated topics such as Atomic Bonds. So now it’s February and you want to start revising and reminding yourself of what happened in that class. The easiest way to do this is to revise shortened notes such as the notes on JC-Learn.

Firstly skim the notes to remind yourself of that particular topic, maybe they are 7 pages long so you plan to cover these in half an hour. Set a timer now. Read the notes once while highlighting the most important parts and things you forgot since the lesson. After reading the notes once go through all the highlighted stuff and make sure you fully understand the concepts and if there is anything you need to learn off by heart such as dates, names or formulas write them out over and over until you are certain. It’s really important in subjects such as History, Religion and Geography you know the facts as this will set you aside from the normal waffling student.

So you know the topic well and that’s great but what you really need to know is what kind of questions are asked in the exam regarding this topic. It’s really important to familiarise yourself with the exam papers and look through all past years which can be found on JC-Learn and then examine the answers which are also provided on the site. An example of this saving time and  being more productive would be looking at the history exam papers and finding you do not need to study the first year History content as much as the Third year content because topics in third year such as World War 2 and Irish Politics in the 1900’s come up much more frequently and are worth a lot more marks.

This method of studying will set you on your way to success.