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RTÉ News
5 days ago
- General
- RTÉ News
Watch: Last minute advice as exam paper boxes arrive at schools
Boxes of exam papers are arriving at secondary schools around the country ahead of the Leaving Certificate and Junior Cycle exams. After months of hard work, pupils begin their exams on Wednesday morning with English Paper 1. The exam papers will all be kept under lock and key until they are handed out to pupils in the exam hall. At St Conleth's Community College in Newbridge, Co Kildare, Principal Patricia O'Brien said it is always a busy day at the school as final preparations take place.
Irish Times
6 days ago
- Health
- Irish Times
Leaving Cert: last-minute subject-by-subject exam tips
The pressure is on – but it's not too late to make a real impact. These final days are all about smart, focused revision rather than cramming. Whether brushing up on key concepts or calming exam nerves, a few strategic moves now can boost your confidence. Here are some last-minute study tips from the experts to help you stay sharp and steady for exam day: English Tips from Conor Murphy, an English teacher at Skibbereen Community College Paper one: READ MORE Familiarise yourself with the exam paper and be conscious of the fact it was designed to lead you into the essay question. The comprehension question, A, reminds you of the various genres as well as genre techniques. B reminds you of the need for structure and purpose. Remember these elements when you attempt the final essay. Revise techniques rather than specific genres. There are so many different genres that can be assessed in B, and in the essay, trying to study each one will become overwhelming. Think about the techniques as moving from aesthetic to persuasive, stopping off at narrative and informative on the way. So, you are looking at things like using an appropriate hook, the power of the adjective, the use of aesthetic language, the various rhetorical techniques available. Then look at the question and, with the audience and medium in mind, plan with reference to these techniques. [ Classroom to College: essential Leaving Cert newsletter for parents, guardians and students ] Paper two: Ignore poet predictions. The poetry question is worth 50 marks, the main text (usually Shakespeare) is 60 marks and the comparative 70. Keep this in mind when you study. Narrow down the quotes you are learning off. Instead of having hundreds for the main text, look for a quote that will work for numerous elements. Look at a quote like the famous 'give me an egg, and I'll give thee two crowns'. How many elements can this be used for? The Fool, Lear, Goneril, Regan, Kingship, fertility, the concept of nothingness and a few other topics. This is why the quote is so often (over) used. Use this exercise as a way of revising Lear. Similarly for the comparative , narrow down the scenes you are studying to scenes that can be used when talking about at least two of the comparative modes. Obviously these will include the opening and closing of the text. When you have these narrowed down, zoom in on specific elements (dialogue, images, stage directions). These are your specific pieces of evidence needed to illustrate your essays. In general, test yourself on the various aspects of the course. Pick a topic and write down what you know, under headings, on a blank sheet of paper with all your notes out of sight. For instance: pick a poet, write down the name of all their poems, then the themes, then the recurring language techniques, then quotes. This will tell you what you know and what you need to go over. Students from St Michael's College, Listowel, Co Kerry with their Leaving Cert exam results last year. Photograph: Domnick Walsh Maths Tips from Eoghan O'Leary, maths teacher at Hamilton High School, Co Cork and head of maths at The Tuition Centre General guidance At this stage, I recommend focusing your revision on individual topics rather than attempting full papers. Concentrate on the topics you're most likely to choose in the exam. Avoid learning new topics you haven't already covered in class – it's time now to revise and refine, not to start from scratch. Revisit the formulae and tables book , and practice using your calculator, especially for operations that involve multiple steps. Also, write out a list of the formulae not included in the tables book and display them somewhere visible so they stay fresh in your mind. When the exam starts, my advice is to find a section A question you like and do it. It will settle your nerves. It could be counterproductive to read the entire paper at the start of the exam, because there is some much information. – Paper one: Functions, differentiation, and integration are unavoidable. They appear across both Section A and Section B, so they should be a big focus during your final days of preparation. Algebra often appears as a full Section A question and is also embedded in many other questions. Ensure you're confident with all the key elements. Sequences & series hasn't appeared in a majobig in recent years—it – ould be due this time. Also, be prepared for a long question involving logarithms and indices , which is quite common. Complex numbers reliably show up in Section A, but not in Section B. Students often ask if they should revise topics like induction, formal proofs, algebraic inequalities, and financial maths that don't appear every year. The answer depends on your target grade: If you're aiming for a H1 , it's worth covering everything to maximise choice. If your goal is a H6 , your time is better spent mastering the more likely and manageable topics, rather than struggling with abstract material. One commonly overlooked topic is area and volume , which can appear with algebra, differentiation, or integration. Even if it doesn't feature prominently in paper one , it's highly likely to come up in paper two. -Paper two Paper two is typically more predictable than paper one. Section A usually includes one question each on: statistics, probability, the line, the circle, trigonometry, and geometry . Section B often features: Two questions combining statistics and probability Two questions involving trigonometry, geometry, and area & volume Students often struggle to revise for Paper 2 because they find several topics difficult – especially probability and geometry . My advice: focus on the core skills in each topic, as these often appear in combination with others. Should you learn the geometry theorems, constructions, and trigonometric identity proofs ? If you're aiming for a H1, yes. But if you haven't already learned them in school, it could be counterproductive to do so now. Focus instead on the questions you're more likely to attempt in the exam. In the exam: Make sure your calculator is in the correct mode (degrees or radians as appropriate). Double-check your answers for correct units and appropriate rounding (decimal places or significant figures). Remember: A score of 539/600 = 89.83%, which equates to a H2. You need to score 540/600 to earn a H1. You don't want to lose a grade over a rounding error. Fle photograph: Eric Luke / The Irish Times Irish Tips from Séadhan de Poire, Irish teacher with Dublin Academy of Education Top tips for the run-in to exams? 'For higher level Irish, start to simplify material to make sure it actually makes sense. I've corrected the State exams, and I've seen a lot of students try to learn material that's too difficult for them. They then try to reproduce this material in exam settings and because they don't understand what they're writing, there's loads of mistakes in it and it ends up making no sense. 'What I tell a lot of my students is to focus on having simpler Irish that they understand and that they can use instead of trying to learn things off by heart. Especially for Irish paper one, for the essay.' Hot predictions? 'For Irish paper one, it's all based off current affairs so there's no magical list of topics. You kind of have to be following what's in the news in and around November, December and January time. That's typically when the paper's set. 'Based off that, the topics that I'm looking at with my own classes this year would be politics, because of the elections that took place here and abroad, the education system, the Irish language, the housing crisis and a little bit on technology. A tip I'd give students is you can overlap a lot of material between those different topics. 'For example, if you're talking about politics and problems – well, housing is a political issue. You don't have to learn five brand new essays. You learn a couple of paragraphs that suit different titles and then you try to fill in the gaps afterwards.' File photograph: Eric Luke French Tips from Elizabeth Lyne, director of The French Leaving Cert paper is 2.5 hours, encompassing the reading and writing tasks. There is then a short 10 minute break, after which students complete the aural or listening section of the exam. For the reading comprehension , students have to read two texts and answer questions based on those texts. The first text is usually journalistic in style and tends to address current issues. The second text is usually an extract from literature, and is more challenging. My top tip is to start with question six as this is asked in English and may give an indication as to the subject matter. Read each section carefully, underlining key parts of the questions, so that you know exactly what you are being asked. For the written section, my top tip is to keep your French clear and simple . Make sure that your opinion questions have an opening, main point/counter or supporting point/personal point and conclusion. Finally, while it is impossible to predict what will appear on the paper, I suggest focusing on climate, refugees, artificial lintelligence, school uniform, study of foreign languages, science as a 'male' subject, circular economy, screen dependency, disposable vapes, over-tourism and emigration Students at Rathdown checking their Leaving Cert results. Photograph: Jason Clarke Photography. Spanish Advice from Katie Lenehan, French and Spanish teacher with Dublin Academy of Education Top tips for the run-in to the exams? 'The biggest piece of advice I would give is to recognise the importance of your reading comprehensions . They're worth 30 per cent of the final grade. They're worth even more than the oral exam is and potentially it's something that students forget about because they have so many other things on. 'For the listening papers, I'd also try to sit a full listening paper each week ... They're quite practical elements that you can do. For the written paper, I'd recommend making sure you have a solid introduction and conclusion learned off for your opinion piece. And have 15 to 20 pieces of vocab for each topic that you're planning on covering for the exam, so it nearly becomes a game of jigsaw.' Hot predictions? Though she prefers to steer clear of the term predictions, Lenehan encourages her Spanish students to focus on papers from 2008-2014, which may crop up again this June. She lists a range of topics to cover – emigration, social media, AI, money, changes in Ireland and the environment. Common mistakes to avoid? She says she had 'crippling' OCD during sixth year and learned the hard way how important it is to look after yourself. 'Absolutely, study has to be a priority, but it doesn't have to be the only priority. [Students] need things like friendship , fresh air, good food. They need to sleep. Try to surround yourself with people that have a similar work ethic, or that have the same target grade as you, and try to encourage each other.' Students discussing their exams at Trinity Comprehensive School, Ballymun, Dublin. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill Biology and chemistry Advice by Caoimhe Ní Mhuirceartaigh, biology and chemistry teacher Top tips for the run-in to the exams? 'The marking scheme for both biology and chemistry papers can be quite word-specific. You need to ensure when you're answering a question that it's not waffle and you're hitting the short, concise points. 'For biology especially, you need to know unit one and unit two really well. You can maximise your marks by focusing on the areas that are very repetitive. Knowing the non-negotiable topics that come up every year and are worth a large portion. In biology, the two most important topics would be genetics and ecology.' Hot predictions? Both subjects, Ní Mhuirceartaigh says, have quite obvious trends. Topics she thinks may appear in the short questions section of the biology paper include food, ecology, genetics and enzymes. For questions on systems, it is worth preparing human reproduction – particularly the menstrual cycle – and the human defence system. For experiments, the food test has a high chance of appearing along with the ecology experiment. On long questions, ecology, genetics, enzymes, microorganisms, photosynthesis and respiration could all be worth some focus. Ní Mhuirceartaigh describes organic chemistry as the most important area to conquer in advance of sitting the chemistry exam. Given you can feature it in three of your eight answers on the paper, it can account for 38 per cent of a student's final grade. Common mistakes to avoid? 'Make sure the study that you do is effective. You're not just reading over notes at this stage – you're assessing yourself. That can mean exam questions. It can mean doing quizzes online, mind maps, flashcards. There are loads of different ways to assess yourself but don't just be sitting reading through notes.'
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Energy Science Days help students learn about renewable energy
May 26—MOSES LAKE — The Moses Lake School District participated in the Energy Science Days, hosted at Big Bend Community College last Wednesday for fifth-grade students. "This used to be the solar car races, but they expanded it this year," MLSD Director of Public Relations Ryan Shannon said. "They really built in more of the STEM education, Energy Sciences, so kids had the opportunity to listen and learn with hands-on activities." The event brought together students from across Grant County to discuss renewable energy with hands-on activities and engaging demonstrations. "They had pizza boxes with tin foil and explaining how solar energy can be used for powering things and cooking and all sorts of interesting components," Shannon said. "With that they learned about electricity." There were opportunities to learn about solar power, safety and battery-operated racing cars. "Grant (County Public Utility District) explained the power and explained downed power lines and walking through the safety component," Shannon said. "As well as the energy component that is found within their power lines, which was actually kind of really cool." The event was put together by BBCC, Sila Nanotechnologies, Group 14, Grant County PUD and the North Central Educational Service District. "They loved it," Shannon said. "Just some of the engagements that I had with students, they were so excited."
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Yahoo
Malcolm X used reading to reach his full potential. Will kids now do the same?
Put yourself inside a 6-by-8-foot prison cell, no window, bare concrete walls. A concrete slab juts out from the wall with a mattress to lay on. There's a creaky desk and chair and, in the corner, a wooden pail to defecate in. For 17½ hours a day, this is your reality. You do have a pen and paper. And there is a library nearby, but only with books. No multimedia center here. No smartphone, no television, maybe one or two radio stations, but only for an hour at night. Those other six-and-a-half hours are spent either working in the laundry or walking outside in the yard. Could you do it? For 39 months? Malcolm X did, and if he hadn't endured this cruelly deprived reality, we would have never heard of him. At Charlestown State Prison (now Bunker Hill Community College), Malcolm Little, as he was called at the time, endured suffocating idleness and boredom. He turned to the books in the prison library for, at the very least, a distraction from the thought of being incarcerated. As he explained to Alex Haley years later: '…I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.' On May 19, 2025, Malcolm X would have been 100 years old. He only made it to 39. That itself is tragic, but it would have been even more so if his mother Louise had never taught him how to read. Louise gathered her seven children around the table during the Great Depression, her husband Earl killed after being run over by a streetcar, and asked them to read aloud from the dictionary, the Bible, and from newspapers established by Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey and Grenadian politician T.A. Marryshow. 'A strong-minded mother,' Malcolm wrote to his older brother Philbert while incarcerated, 'has strong-minded children.' According to the National Literacy Institute (NLI), not only are 21% of American adults illiterate, but also '130 million adults are now unable to read a simple story to their children.' Imagine if Louise did not have the ability to read to Malcolm or teach him how to read aloud and hear his voice gain strength. Would he have been able to survive those hellish months in prison? Would he have been able to write his now-famous speech, 'The Ballot or the Bullet,' delivered at Cleveland's Cory Methodist Church on East 105th Street? In prison, as Malcolm read, 'months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned.' Reading, even in that tiny, ancient, decrepit cell, released him. 'I never had been so truly free in my life,' he wrote in his autobiography. 'Black Fourth of July': Before it became a federal holiday, Boynton activist knew Juneteenth needed a celebration Smartphones have the power to capture the mind of a child or teenager and place it on a hamster wheel fueled by dopamine, an imprisonment of distraction. In 2025, reading a book takes a backseat (is it even in the car?) to the eye strain required to take in a 15-second soundbite, watch a ball strike a line of dominos, enjoy a new music video or scroll an endless clothing catalog. At Charlestown, Malcolm threw himself into reading a wide range of titles. He cracked open an old copy of Shakespeare's Macbeth, unsure of what exactly he was reading. But he had time and little to no distraction, so he dug into the etymology using a dictionary. As he improved, he was eventually transferred to Norfolk Prison Library, and the prison library there was large enough for him to find more specific titles. He devoured Frederik Bodmer's The Loom of Language, studied Grimm's Law, read ancient Persian poetry and joined a Great Books discussion group, Machiavelli's The Prince being one of the 17 books discussed. Here's hoping it doesn't take prison for children to crack open a new book and learn about another world. Patrick Parr's third book is Malcolm Before X, published by the University of Massachusetts Press. He grew up in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, and graduated from Cuyahoga Falls High School in 1999. This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Malcolm X shows the power of reading, even decades later | Opinion
San Francisco Chronicle
15-05-2025
- Business
- San Francisco Chronicle
Here's just how bad the ‘ghost student' crisis has gotten at California colleges
In California community colleges, the ghost students are winning. Criminals using bots to pose as real students siphoned off $13 million of financial aid over the last year — up 74% from the prior year, when the fraudsters stole $7.5 million of the federal Pell Grant and Cal Grant money intended for students. The latest figure is four times the $3.3 million swiped by the fraudbots two years ago, when state officials said they were just setting up security systems. On Tuesday, state Chancellor Sonya Christian will ask the community college system's Board of Governors to begin charging students a 'nominal fee' to pay for stepped up anti-fraud measures and require extra identity verification steps to enroll in the state's 116 colleges. (Christian's office says the fee would be in the 'tens of dollars.') 'Fraudulent application attempts have been increasing over the past two years,' according to the recommendation from Christian's office, item 4.4 on the May 20 agenda. 'These measures will ensure that the California Community College system remains accessible and available to all potential students.' Financial aid fraud has percolated for years in California and elsewhere. But it has escalated in recent years, alongside artificial intelligence and Americans' pandemic-driven affinity for online education — especially in community colleges that admit nearly everyone who applies. It works like this: Criminals using stolen identities and web-crawlers gain admission through the state's online system, CCCApply. Bots that slip past security software then try to register for classes at the college level. If successful there — and if no instructor disenrolls the ghost students after noticing such red flags as consecutive address numbers or fake-looking photos — the bots can generate financial aid applications and disappear once the checks roll in. The chancellor's proposal to increase security around the state's online application portal coincides with new attention to the fraud from congressional Republicans and state Democrats alike. On April 23, Assemblymember Blanca Rubio, D-Baldwin Park, requested a state audit to identify fraud patterns across California and to better understand what's happening overall. 'The cost to individual districts is enormous,' Rubio wrote in her request, noting that every college district deploys IT specialists, admissions and records administrators and many other staff members who spent countless hours wrestling with the problem. Last month, nine Republican U.S. representatives from California also called for a federal investigation into the problem, declaring that even if Gov. Gavin Newsom's newly revised budget proposal includes cuts, 'allowing this rise in fraud to go unaddressed is negligent.' Newsom's proposal, released Wednesday, would increase community college funding by about 1%, leaving the $14 billion budget roughly flat. Yet the extent to which federal officials can continue their efforts to fight student aid fraud is unclear. The Office of the Inspector General — the law enforcement arm of the U.S. Department of Education — lost 20% of its staff this year in overall downsizing, the office told the Chronicle. California's college officials detected and thwarted fraud in 31.4% of the roughly 2 million community college applications last year, up from 20% in 2023. 'The share is increasing,' Chris Ferguson, head of finance at the state chancellor's office, told the Chronicle. He was referring not only to the state's success at catching bots, but also to the attempts to defraud. It's all a bit like dousing bacteria with antibiotics. Some germs keep finding new ways around the medicine. It's up to state education officials to try and stop fraudbots from being admitted into the California Community College system in the first place. But many thousands of ghost students bust through those security systems each year and 'certainly are making it into the enrollment phase,' said Ferguson, who wrote the state recommendations for the new student fee and added security measures. There, they flood into colleges, crowding out legitimate students with the aim of fooling administrators into approving them for tax-funded grant money. In Oakland, Eleni Gastis, chair of the Laney College journalism department, can fit 40 students into her popular Survey of Mass Media class and turns away many others. Yet only about half of those enrolled in the online class are human. The rest — 17, this semester — are bots under the control of fraudsters aiming to collect some of the billions of dollars in financial aid that flow through community colleges across the country. The challenge for thousands of instructors like Gastis is to identify the ghost students fast enough to disenroll them before any grant money is paid out, and soon enough so that real students still have time to take their place before the enrollment deadline. The bots mainly seek out online classes that are not livestreamed, meaning that students can tune in to hear prerecorded lectures at their convenience without ever showing their face or speaking to an instructor. While that approach makes college more accessible to busy parents and others with atypical schedules, it's also a boon to the faceless fraudbots that rely on fake or stolen identities to mimic legitimate students. 'Now I make students do a video introduction,' said Gastis, who was the first instructor in the Peralta Community College District to flag the bot problem, back in 2021. Her new approach can't prevent bots from enrolling. But requiring an on-camera appearance helps Gastis identify the fakes — those that don't make the video — before they can collect financial aid. 'Are all faculty doing this? I don't know,' said Gastis, who has become an activist for data transparency and for coordinating prevention efforts across the state — rather the current approach of operating in secrecy to avoid tipping off fraudsters. Gastis' see-their-faces strategy is similar to that at Calbright, the state's only all-online community college, which requires its 6,500 students to participate in a Zoom session before enrolling. 'Due to Calbright's student-centered and human-centered enrollment process, we do not encounter non-student or 'bot' enrollments at this time,' said Sarah Jimenez, the college's spokesperson. Most community colleges and the state chancellor's office — which won't release fraud data about individual college districts — will reveal almost nothing about prevention efforts, fearing that that would make the problem worse. For example, officials at Gastis' district in Oakland declined to answer questions about their anti-bot measures. 'Because those nefarious people perpetrating the fraud are paying close attention,' said Tina Vasconcellos, the Peralta district's head of educational services. But Gastis believes that being more open would help faculty understand what practices work best and allow them to standardize procedures. Instead, depending on their level of interest, instructors do much of the work on their own, including clearing class rosters of fraudbots and figuring out how to overhaul teaching strategies to uncover the ghosts. 'I take it on willingly because I lose sleep over the thought that a student might not get a class they need' due to bots, Gastis said. But college culture typically holds that it's up to students to drop out of classes if they want to — and not the faculty's job to kick them out. So many instructors prefer to give students a D or F, even if they don't show up, rather than drop them. That approach perpetuates fraud, however, because once a student is given a grade, administrators are less likely to classify them as a bot, Gastis said. Yet she credits Peralta for agreeing to her faculty-backed proposal last fall that gives instructors more time to evaluate their class rosters for fraud. As for the state's idea to charge students a fee for new security measures, 'that's insane,' Gastis said. 'We're supposed to be about removing barriers and creating access. This is not a way to solve the problem.'
