Preparing for the LGS With ADHD: For Parents and Students

What makes the LGS (high school entrance exam) year hard for a student with ADHD is not the exam, it is the calendar.

This exam falls in the year adolescence begins. Three things happen at once in the same period: the academic load increases, the demand for independence from the family rises and the appearance of ADHD changes.

The picture that emerges when all three happen together is something neither the parent nor the student expected.

What ADHD turns into in adolescence

The picture familiar from childhood changes its disguise in this period.

Visible restlessness decreases. The child who ran around the classroom is gone, and in their place is an adolescent who sits in the desk but whose head is elsewhere. In most families this change is read as “it passed.”

It does not pass. What stands out moves to other headings: attention, organization and time management. In the article on ADHD in adolescence I took up this transformation in detail.

The problem is that LGS preparation asks for exactly these three skills. That is, while the symptoms become invisible, the price of those symptoms becomes this high for the first time.

Why the student who got by struggles this year

There is a very common picture: a student whose grades went well in fifth, sixth and seventh grade suddenly drops in eighth grade.

The reason is usually not that the child has changed but that the load has changed.

In previous years the curriculum is narrow, the exams come close together and the topic headings are short. Under these conditions short-term, last-minute study is enough. A student with ADHD can get through this period with panic productivity; I wrote how this works in the article on panic productivity.

In eighth grade the scope widens and the exam moves months away. The last-minute strategy does not work, because there is now too much to fit into the last minute.

This is not a regression. It is a strategy reaching its limit of use.

How much control to hand over

This is the hardest parenting question of this year, and there is a wrong answer at both ends.

The first extreme: letting go completely. “They've grown up, let them take their own responsibility.” This means pulling the structure away all at once, and in ADHD a structure pulled away all at once does not come back.

The second extreme: following everything. Homework checks, tracking hours, constant reminding. This works in the short term but produces two problems. First, it creates resistance in adolescence and the energy goes not to the exam but to the arguments. Second, the child never builds their own system; in high school they hit the same wall harder.

The middle way is gradual handover. Structure keeps being given from outside but a part of it passes to the child each term.

In concrete terms: in the first term you make the weekly plan together, in the second term the child makes it and you look at it, in the third term the child makes it and you review it together once a week.

Moving the reminding to the wall

This single change takes away most of the tension at home.

A verbal reminder does two jobs at once: it gives the information and it builds a role. The name of the role is the reminder and the reminded. Once this role is in place, the same sentence stops being heard as information and is heard as pressure.

The solution is to keep the information the same and change its source. A weekly chart hung on the wall gives the same information without producing an argument. Because the chart blames nobody.

This also works especially well for a child with ADHD: the job of remembering is loaded onto the environment, not onto memory. In the article on the visible-place system I wrote the counterpart of the same logic in home organization.

A weekly cycle, not a daily schedule

An hour-by-hour filled-in schedule collapses in LGS preparation too, and for the same reason: time estimates are not reliable, and not every day passes with the same energy.

In its place a weekly cycle is set up. The day is fixed, the time is flexible. Monday mathematics, Tuesday Turkish, Wednesday science. How much is studied that day changes according to the state of the day.

This setup has a side benefit: the decision about which course to look at when is made once a week. When the number of decisions falls, the energy spent per decision falls too.

In the article on the study schedule I wrote step by step how to set up this cycle.

Let the day have a single main task

Most eighth-grade plans have five or six tasks in a day. In ADHD this plan collapses at the first hiccup.

For the day to count as complete, finishing a single item should be enough. The others are a bonus.

The psychological effect of this looks small but is decisive. A year that ends every day with “I couldn't do it” changes the child's belief about themselves, and that belief makes studying even harder. I described this cycle in the article on shame and self-compassion.

Practice exams

In the LGS process practice exams start very early and are often used wrongly.

A practice exam is a measuring tool. Talking about the score is the part of the measurement that gives the least information.

After every practice exam, three things should be looked at separately.

Blanks. Is it blank because time ran out, or because it was not known? These two require completely different solutions.

The type of mistakes. Is it a gap in knowledge, a calculation error, or misreading the question? In students with ADHD the second and third categories turn out more crowded than expected, and they do not get fixed by studying topics.

Time distribution. Did they stay a long time on a single question? I took this up in the article on practice exams and time management.

The analysis needs to be done the same day. An analysis left to the next day is not done.

Careless mistakes are a separate heading

What stands out most in the practice-exam paper of a student with ADHD is that they missed a question they knew.

Shifting the marking, not seeing the minus sign, skipping the word “not” in a “which of these is not” question, making a mistake in the last digit of a four-operation calculation.

These are not gaps in knowledge, and they do not get fixed by the warning “be careful.” What fixes them is the habit of checking: underlining the negative expression, repeating the last step when an operation is finished, checking the number when moving to the optical answer sheet.

These habits need to be built in practice exams; a habit built on exam day does not hold.

The school side is a separate process

Parents often confuse these two: exam preparation and in-school accommodations are separate jobs.

On the school side, the educational evaluation is done through the Guidance and Research Center (RAM). I described the process in the article on RAM.

The plan prepared at school after the evaluation is the BEP, the individualized education program. In ADHD the BEP generally arranges not the curriculum but the presentation, time, environment and the form of assessment. I took this up in detail in the article on the BEP.

There is also the support education room; in the article on the support education room I wrote who can benefit from it.

All three of these processes run on their own calendars and all are independent of exam preparation. They need to be started at the beginning of eighth grade; a process started in the middle does not catch up within the year.

Accommodations in the central exam

In central exams such as the LGS, requests for accommodations are submitted on the basis of a health report, and which implementation will be made is determined by regulation.

I will make only one warning on this: the rules and the application calendar need to be confirmed from the current guide. The format and conditions can change from year to year, and acting on last year's information carries risk.

I took up the general framework in Türkiye in the article on exam accommodations.

Screens and sleep

These two headings are the ones that cause the most argument in the LGS year, and in both a one-sided rule does not work.

In adolescence a rigid rule imposed from outside produces resistance. What lasts longer is an agreement written together that binds both sides. For example the phone charging in a shared place after a certain hour at night; on condition that it applies to the parent as well.

On the sleep side there is one thing to know: sleep loss is negatively related to learning and academic performance, and in ADHD it adds an extra burden. Sleeplessness directly impairs attention, impulse control and emotion regulation.

That is, studying that runs late affects not the hours studied but the whole of the next day. In the article on sleep I took up this relationship in both directions.

Comparison with siblings

I am writing this heading separately, because the most harmful sentences at home come from here.

The sentence “your older sister wasn't like this at your age” gives no information, it only sets up a comparison. A child with ADHD already compares themselves with peers and already thinks they are behind.

The same holds in meetings with teachers. Talking from concrete behavior is always more productive than talking from comparison. In the article on meeting with the teacher I wrote how to set up this conversation.

If the child does not want to study

Behind this sentence there is often not a not-wanting.

There are three possibilities and the three are different.

Being unable to start. The child wants to study and cannot sit down at the desk. I described this in the article on task paralysis; from outside it looks like unwillingness, from inside it feels like freezing.

Avoidance. Approaching the subject carries an emotional load; usually there is a failure experienced in that course in the past. I wrote the difference in the article on procrastination or avoidance.

Real unwillingness. This can happen too and is legitimate. A fourteen-year-old may not want to give a year of their life to an exam.

The solutions to the three differ, and intervening without understanding which it is does not work.

What is happening at school

In eighth grade the school itself changes too, and this change directly affects the picture at home.

The course load increases, practice exams enter school hours, the teachers' expectations rise. A student who got by before starts to struggle visibly for the first time under these conditions.

There is one thing to watch here: a drop at school may not be related to studying at home. Holding attention in class is a separate task, and when that task tires, there is no capacity left in the child who comes home.

That is why talking to the teacher about the situation at school is as important as building the plan at home. In the article on meeting with the teacher I wrote how to set up this meeting: instead of explaining the diagnosis, saying concretely what is happening in the classroom and what is being asked.

The accommodations that can be asked for are small and cost-free ones: seating at the front, giving written instructions, breaking long homework into parts, extra time in exams. None of them changes the curriculum.

Taking the need for movement into account

This is the heading most overlooked at this age and the easiest to solve.

In eighth grade, the first thing cut in most families is sports. The logic is clear: there is an exam, there is no time.

Yet movement in this equation is an item to be added, not removed. Positive effects of exercise on attention, executive functions and mood are reported, and there is an interesting finding: forms of movement that also engage the mind show a larger effect than plain running.

I took this up in detail in the article on exercise.

Its most practical use is as a timing tool: a short bit of movement right before a hard lesson opens a short-term window for that lesson.

Movement can be added to sitting at home too. Intervals of working standing up, an object to hold in the hand, standing up every forty minutes. In the article on moving while sitting I wrote the evidence side of this.

Setting up the study environment at home

At this age the environment is more decisive than in adults, because the child's chance to arrange their own environment is limited.

Three things matter.

Where the phone is. Putting it on silent is not enough; a phone that gets notifications disturbs attention even if it is not touched. The solution is physical: the phone in another room. This should be set up not as a punishment but as a shared arrangement. I took this up in the article on distractions.

The top of the desk. Let only the current lesson be on it. Everything visible is a candidate for distraction, and the filter for sorting things out is already strained in ADHD.

Sound. Complete silence does not suit everyone; when arousal drops, the mind starts to produce its own stimulus. In some children a constant background sound works better. I wrote this balance in the article on the study environment.

If there is a sibling, a separate matter arises: two children studying in the same room break each other's attention. A separate hour if possible, a separate direction if not.

Results day and after

This part has to be written because it is lived unprepared.

The result may come in below what was expected. The sentences said that day stay for a long time, and in a child with ADHD they are especially lasting; the emotion arrives higher and comes down late.

The approach that works is not to tie the result to the amount of studying. The sentence “if only you had studied more” may not be true and is of no use. The result of a year depends on more than study time.

The second point: this exam is described as a turning point but it is not. Changing high schools is possible, transfers are possible, the road to university is not a single one. The child needs to hear this, and it is better to hear it before results day.

The bad-week version

At least once during the year everything will stop. An illness, a bad practice exam, exhaustion or something in the family.

For these weeks there should be a small version written into the plan: twenty minutes a day, one course, one topic. Its aim is not to progress but to protect the streak.

Because in ADHD a system that has been dropped completely is not rebuilt, it is built from scratch. And the cost of building from scratch is much higher than a week of slowing down.

The school day and recess

In eighth grade the day is long and the child already comes home exhausted. This exhaustion directly determines the quality of evening study.

There are a few things that lighten the school day, and all of them are of the kind that can be discussed with the teacher.

Movement at recess. A child who spends the recess in the classroom goes into the next lesson with less in the tank. Movement opens a window for the next lesson.

Sitting at the front. When movement around them leaves the field of view, attention is interrupted less.

A written repeat of verbal instructions. An instruction written on the board is missed far less than one given verbally.

All three are cost-free and all three are the kind of concrete request I described in the article on meeting with the teacher.

Homework colliding with exam preparation

This is the most wearing conflict of eighth grade. There is school homework, there is a practice exam, there is topic review and there are not four hours in the evening.

A decision on priorities is needed here, and the child cannot make this decision alone.

The setup that works is this: homework and preparation do not compete on the same evening, they are distributed across the week. Certain days are homework-heavy, certain days are preparation-heavy.

In addition, the amount of homework can become a matter of accommodation. Giving a student with ADHD fewer questions that measure the same learning outcome is an adaptation that can be planned within the BEP. Measuring how long the homework takes and taking it to the teacher gives a basis for this request.

I took up this heading in detail in the article on homework follow-up.

Siblings and household order

If there is another child at home, two separate problems arise.

The first is the environment. Two children working in the same room break each other's attention and the one with ADHD is affected more. A separate hour or a separate direction is an applicable solution in most homes.

The second is the perception of fairness. The flexibilities given to the child in the exam year produce a sense of injustice in the other sibling; conversely, the child in the exam year also sees the sibling's freedom as their own loss.

What works is to tie the arrangement to the situation, not to the person. Instead of the sentence “your older sister is in her exam year,” the frame “this year the person who is in their exam year is given this flexibility” also says that their turn will come.

Motivation and reward

At this age a distant goal does not work at all. The sentence “you'll get into a good high school” produces no signal for an evening in October.

The reason is what I wrote in the article on dopamine and motivation: in ADHD the value of a delayed reward falls faster.

The practical counterpart is to bring the reward closer. Something small every week, something a little bigger every month. The size of the reward is not important; its nearness is.

There is one point to watch: the reward should be tied to behavior, not to performance. A reward tied to a practice-exam score is tied to something that cannot be controlled and turns a bad practice exam into a double punishment. A reward tied to sitting down on the day is tied to something in the child's own hands.

Choosing a high school after the result

This is the least talked about but heaviest week of the year in terms of decision load.

A decision with many options, with a time limit and irreversible. All three together produce analysis paralysis in ADHD.

The preparation that works is done before the score is announced: a list of schools of interest is drawn up in advance and the decision criteria are written in advance. Is distance important, or the type of school, or the circle of friends?

When the score comes the list is shortened; it is not built from scratch. This single change turns that week from a crisis into a process of elimination.

What is left for me

The thing that does the most harm at this age is the exam being presented as a test of character.

The sentence “you get as much as you want” is not true and is especially destructive in a child with ADHD. Because a child whose wanting is high and whose carrying capacity is different draws a single conclusion when they hear this sentence: so I don't want it enough.

The score obtained at the end of this year does not measure how much the child wanted it. It measures how well the structure was built, and building the structure is not the child's job alone.

The information here is a general framework. Decisions on diagnosis and treatment are confirmed with your doctor, educational decisions with the RAM and your school, and exam details with the current guide.