Leaving Cert weather arrived with a vengeance last week, to the joy of all those not sitting State exams – but to the perennial horror of exam students, maybe particularly this year’s ones.
“The sun is shining in at me and I’m in my room,” 18-year-old Kayleigh Quinn from Meath says. She’s preparing for this year’s Leaving Cert exams, even though she left school in second year.
“When I was younger I just didn’t settle in, in first year,” she explains. “I think it was because we were obviously the Covid year. We didn’t have sixth-class graduation. We went in and it was all masks and everything, so I just didn’t get on. I didn’t make any friends. Second year came and I was like, ‘No, I can’t do this’. So I just stopped going to school. My parents didn’t really know what to do with me.”
In spite of this, she still sat the Junior Cycle exams. “YouTube and ChatGPT”, were her learning tools of choice, she explains. “I was really disillusioned with education. My mental health got so bad, I ended up in Temple Street for a while … It was the best thing that ever happened to me in retrospect. And it was one comment from a psychiatrist - she just said, ‘Well, we don’t expect you do your Junior Cert there’ and it was just like, ‘Well, I need to show them now’.”
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This was a mere two months before the exams were due to start. She sat the exams as an external student. The experience, she says, gave her the confidence to take the Leaving Cert exams, and she’s aiming high. Maximum points, to be exact.
Following the Junior Cycle exams, Quinn returned to school to undertake Transition Year, and volunteered with numerous medical charities. “That’s when I decided, ‘Right. I’m going to do medicine’.”
Quinn moved school in fifth year, and for the first half of the school year, she says her attendance was good. But after Christmas, her school attendance began to trail off. “The exhaustion hit me again. I got really moody. My parents noticed it as well, and I wasn’t really retaining any[thing]… my teachers tried their best, but just being in the classroom environment, I found it really hard to learn.”
She made a decision not to return to school and to study for the Leaving Cert herself at home. “I invested in some of the study platforms,” she says.
[ Short absences from school linked to lower Leaving Cert grades, study findsOpens in new window ]
Acutely aware of the high points needed for medicine, Quinn has applied to colleges in the UK also, and she’s received offers of places, subject to meeting grade requirements.
Knowing this helps her manage her anxiety.
As the exams approach, she’s feeling most comfortable about biology, but admits she’s dreading English and physics.
So why is the first exam such a dread for her?
“I’m really bad at making stuff up on the spot,” she says, laughing.
