Junior Certificate History

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If you want to do well in Junior Cert History, you will have to keep a careful eye on the time. Students often run out of time in the exam as there's a lot of content to write.

One of the best ways you can prepare is to study a chapter, practice questions on Studyclix for that chapter and then check your answers against the marking scheme.

What's on the Junior certificate History course

Age of Exploration
Agricultural & Industrial Revolution
Ancient & Early Christian Ireland
Ancient Rome
Archaeology
Document Q.s
European Unity
Middle Ages
Modern Ireland (after 1948)
Plantations
Political Revolutions
Reformation & Counter Reformation
Renaissance
Social Change in 20th Century
Superpowers
Towards a Republic (Ireland pre 1948)
War in Europe
African & Asian Nationalism

What's the Junior certificate History exam like?

The higher level exam is 2 hours and 30 minutes long and you must do 6 questions (There is a choice in question 6). You should spend about 25 minutes on each section which will leave you with 10 minutes to read over your answers at the end.

Q 1 is a pictures question where you answer questions on a given picture

Q2. is a documents question, where you answer questions on given documents

Q3. is 20 short-answer questions

Q4. is where you are given a choice of People in history to write about.

Q5. & Q6. Are long questions drawn from any part of the course.

Ordinary level is a shorter 90 minute exam with no Q5 or Q6.

Any tips for doing well in Junior certificate History ?

Make sure not to leave out parts of the course as the short questions usually cover almost all topics. Students often wonder how much they should write in their answers. It's a good idea to be guided by the mark allocations written on the exam paper. A good rule of thumb is to divide the number of marks by two and this represents the number of points you should make in your answer i.e. a 10 mark question should have 5 points in it.

Download the Junior certificate History Syllabus

Download the Junior cert History Chief examiner's report (2008)

Download the Junior cert History Guidelines for Teachers