1. Underlining things with highlighter pens is not the same as committing them to memory
2. Staying up until 3am the night before English Paper I will not ensure a deep and lasting knowledge of contemporary literature or the great poets
3. Generally speaking, you’re not learning if you’re speaking, so stop TELLING everyone how hard you are studying and just bloody do it
4. Pressure is for tyres! Yes, you think this is the MOST stressful time of your life, but wait until you start work and get home from a 12hour day to a flat you can barely afford and your mum does NOT have the fire lit and your dinner ready
5. Get a Ouija board, make a virgin sacrifice, stare into tea leaves for as long as you like - unless you are The Oracle, no matter how hard you try, you’ll never be able to predict what topics are coming up
6. In the future, when you have a job, you will NOT celebrate after every achievement by going apesh*t at your elders, mixing six types of spirits in a Robinson's lemonade bottle and drinking it, having waterfights or drawing penises on your colleagues' shirts
7. It’s lovely that your granny is praying for you but the amount of candles she lights at mass is unlikely to have any bearing on how many points you get
8. Yes, indicies are essential for understanding most algebraic processes and your Maths teacher says they are important, but I’ve yet to meet someone who makes regular practical use of them on a daily basis in their adult life…except Maths teachers
9. Memorising Yeats’ No Second Troy or Austin Clarke's The Lost Heifer might seem like a big fat waste of time, but I swear it will come in very handy when you are in a packed bar in America on St Patrick’s Day
(Picture: Photocall Ireland)10. For one month after you get your results, one of two things will happen. Either your parents will LOUDLY ANNOUNCE that little James got SIX HUNDRED AND TWENTY points everytime you enter a room, or they will look shirty when anyone asks how the exams went and say ‘Well what can you expect, he did NO study…” Regardless, after that, no one will ever mention your leaving cert results ever again
11. Eating three bananas, two Tracker bars and guzzling a bottle of Lucozade before your science exam does not help you recall the stages of photosynthesis any faster
12. That unbearable kid in your class who did 13 subjects and got straight A1s might get be a regarded as a genius now, but he/she will still be unbearable in 15 years time
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