How to Study for the Leaving Cert in 3 Months
A triage plan for the last three months before the Leaving Cert: what the CAO points grid says to work on first, and how to use past papers.
ExamAI Team10 min read 
If you are starting seriously in March, you have about thirteen weeks before the first written paper. That is enough time to change grades. It is not enough time to teach yourself a full course from scratch, so the work has to be triage. You find where the remaining marks are and go after those with real past papers and their marking schemes. Some material still goes into June at the level it is at now.
It is not too late. What has changed since September is which parts of the year are still ahead of you. In March every written paper is still ahead, and the written papers are the last components of the exam to be sat.
If you want the full year, our post on when to start studying for the Leaving Cert walks through it phase by phase. This one stays inside the last stretch of it.
How long the last stretch really is
The mocks are run by your school and not by the SEC, so there is no national date for them. They land somewhere between the January return and the spring oral exams.
In 2026 the written exams opened with English Paper 1 on Wednesday 3 June (Irish Times). In 2025 they opened on Wednesday 4 June (Irish Times). Counting back from either, the start of March is about thirteen weeks out.
Thirteen weeks is the outer figure. Two of them are the Easter break, and in some subjects part of the rest goes on exams that are not written papers.
Check which of your subjects have spring dates
The State Examinations Commission runs the orals and practicals in the spring, months before the June timetable, and the coursework deadlines fall there too. How much this affects you depends on your subjects.
These dates are the SEC's provisional schedule of examination and completion dates for 2026/27, so they are the ones a student starting in March 2027 works to. The SEC marks the schedule provisional and says the dates can change, so take your own year's version from examinations.ie.
The oral examinations run from Saturday 20 March to Thursday 25 March 2027, the music, art, construction and engineering practicals run through April and early May, and the Computer Science written exam is on Wednesday 19 May 2027. The full provisional list, with session times, is in our post on when the Leaving Cert is on.
Coursework deadlines sit in the same window. The Computer Science coursework project is due Tuesday 16 March 2027, the Applied Mathematics modelling project Friday 9 April 2027, and the Chemistry in Practice investigation Friday 23 April 2027. Friday 30 April 2027 carries seven coursework deadlines, including the History research study report, the Geographical Investigation report and the Politics and Society citizenship project.
How much of a subject's total marks those components carry varies from subject to subject. Several subjects are also being redeveloped under the senior cycle changes, so take the split from your own subject's current specification.
The timing is the part that affects your plan. If you take a language, Art, Construction, Music, Engineering or Computer Science, your written-exam preparation time is shorter than thirteen weeks. The March and April dates are also the ones you cannot move.
Rank subjects by what a grade band is worth
The CAO adds up your six best scores from one sitting, so a seventh subject scores nothing unless it displaces one of the six (CAO Handbook 2026). Check that first, because it can take a whole subject off your list.
After that, the useful question is what one grade band is worth where you currently sit. The points grid does not space the bands evenly, so the answer is not the same everywhere.
| Points gained by moving up one band | Higher Level | Ordinary Level |
|---|---|---|
| grade 2 to grade 1 | H2 to H1, +12 | O2 to O1, +10 |
| grade 3 to grade 2 | H3 to H2, +11 | O3 to O2, +9 |
| grade 4 to grade 3 | H4 to H3, +11 | O4 to O3, +9 |
| grade 5 to grade 4 | H5 to H4, +10 | O5 to O4, +8 |
| grade 6 to grade 5 | H6 to H5, +10 | O6 to O5, +8 |
| grade 7 to grade 6 | H7 to H6, +9 | O7 to O6, +12 |
| grade 8 to grade 7 | H8 to H7, +37 | O8 to O7, +0 |
Above H7, one band at Higher Level is worth between 9 and 12 points wherever you are. Moving a weak subject from H7 to H6 gains 9 points. Moving a strong one from H3 to H2 gains 11. Those two pieces of work are worth within 2 points of each other. Pick whichever of them you can actually reach in the weeks you have.
Two entries sit outside that range, and both involve a zero.
A H8 is worth 0 points and a H7 is worth 37. So lifting a Higher Level subject from under 30% up to 30% is worth 37 points. That is more than the H2 to H1, H3 to H2 and H4 to H3 moves combined. It only applies if you are below 30%, and a marked paper is what tells you that. At Ordinary Level the zero band is wider, because an O7 scores 0 as well. The equivalent move there is from under 40% up to 40%, an O6, worth 12 points.
Higher Level maths carries 25 bonus points at H6 and above. A H7 in Higher maths is worth 37 and gets no bonus at all. A H6 is worth 46 plus the 25, so 71. That one band is worth 34 points, provided maths is still among your best six once the bonus has been added. Nothing else on the grid comes close outside of escaping a H8.
The full rules, including the maths bonus and the LCVP Link Modules, are in our post on how CAO points work. The percentage each band covers is in Leaving Cert grades explained. If the arithmetic points at a level change, should I drop to Ordinary Level works through that decision, including how late you can make it.
Find out where you actually are
The points table tells you what a band is worth. You still need to know which band you are in, and in March that is the number the whole plan depends on.
Sit one past paper per subject, closed book and timed. Then mark it against the official marking scheme and divide your total by the marks available. The percentage lands in a band, and the table above tells you what the band next door is worth. Our guide on studying with past papers covers sitting and marking one properly.
Do this before you plan anything. Your sense of a subject and its marked percentage can differ in either direction, and only the percentage ranks against the points grid. A paper that comes back at 46% is a H6, 4 percentage points below a H5, whatever the subject felt like on the day.
Papers and marking schemes are free from the SEC, so the cost is one exam-length sitting per subject plus the time to mark it.
Work at topic level
Work topic by topic against past questions. That produces a list of things you got wrong, which you can act on. Rereading a full course in thirteen weeks produces coverage you cannot measure.
The reason this works in a short window is that the record repeats at topic level while the wording does not. Across the eleven Higher Level Biology papers from 2015 to 2025, no two questions from different years share more than 52% of their vocabulary, and yet genetics appeared in all eleven of those papers. Our post on whether Leaving Cert questions repeat sets out both counts and where they come from.
So the unit of work is a topic across several years. The subject topic pages group the past questions that way, with the marking scheme beside each one, for genetics in Biology, calculus in Maths and the other strands.
Read the instruction page of your own paper
Papers set a choice of questions, and how much choice differs by subject. On the 2025 Higher Level Biology paper you answered five of seven questions in Section A, two of three in Section B and four of seven in Section C. That is eleven of the seventeen questions set (2025 paper, page 2). Take the split from the most recent paper for your own subject and year, because structures change; biology, for one, moves to a new exam format from 2027 (what changed). On 2025 Higher Level Maths Paper 1 you answered five of six in Section A and three of four in Section B, so eight of the ten set (2025 paper, page 3).
Choice does not let you skip a topic safely. You do not control which topic turns up in which question, and one question can draw on several. The instruction page does tell you how much room the paper leaves. That differs enough between subjects to be worth checking before you write anything off.
The same page carries the time budget. The 2025 Biology paper recommends 30 minutes on Section A, 30 on Section B and 120 on Section C, which is where 240 of the 400 marks are.
What three months will not do
There is no hours-per-day figure to hit. No official source publishes one, including the SEC and the Department of Education. Our when to start studying post makes the same point at more length. A marked past paper gives you something checkable, because it measures what you can do under exam conditions today.
Predicted papers do not shorten the work either. The Irish Examiner reported a statement from the SEC on Tuesday 26 May 2026. The SEC said candidates "should be wary of all sources which claim to have knowledge of an examination paper in advance". It added that prediction claims "should be considered spurious whether generated through AI systems or otherwise" (Irish Examiner). If the prediction is wrong, you sit the paper without the topics you dropped.
And the spring dates hold. Coursework due in March and April is due then whatever else is happening, and an oral in late March is not moved by how the mocks went.
FAQ
Is it too late to start studying for the Leaving Cert in March? No. From the start of March to the first written paper is about thirteen weeks, and every written paper is still ahead of you. What you have missed is anything already sat or already submitted.
How many hours a day should I study in the last three months? No official source publishes a figure, the SEC and the Department of Education included. Use marked past papers to judge progress.
What should I do first? Sit one past paper in each subject under timed conditions and mark it against the official scheme. You need to know which band you are in before you can work out where a band is worth most.
Can I go from a H5 to a H2 in three months? A H5 covers 50% to under 60% and a H2 covers 80% to under 90%. So the rise is at least 20 percentage points on the paper, and 30 if you are at the bottom of the H5. Nobody publishes how long that takes, and it varies by subject and starting point. The checkable version is your marked paper percentage now and the same number again in a month.
Which subject should I put the most time into? The one where a band is both valuable and reachable. On the points grid, lifting a Higher Level subject from under 30% into a H7 is worth 37 points. Lifting Higher maths from H7 to H6 is worth 34, because of the 25 bonus points, provided maths lands in your best six once the bonus is added. Elsewhere at Higher Level, one band is worth 9 to 12 points wherever you are.
Do I still need to do full papers, or just topics? Both, in that order. A full timed paper tells you where you stand and how you handle the clock. Topic work is what changes the number.
Are grinds worth it this late? That depends on cost and on what you would otherwise do with the hours. Our post on what grinds cost in Ireland has the published prices and what the ESRI found about the effect on grades.
Start with one paper. The ExamAI past paper finder gets you a Leaving Cert paper with its official marking scheme in one search. The subject topic pages group the past questions by topic, so you can work on one thing at a time.