Leaving Cert: Students down to earth on agri exam
Seamus Hynes of the Teachers’ Union of Ireland believes the higher-level paper was trickier than last year’s. While there was a good range of topics, he said high grades would be tough to achieve as all questions required some level of very specific answering.
In the very first short question, he felt students might automatically have answered which family the clover plant is a member of, rather than the phylum for which they were asked.
A question on soil expected students to work from the provided results of an experiment to determine soil texture, and Mr Hynes thought a considerable degree of higher order thinking was needed to suggest the type of farm the soil would suit and why.
He had a similar view about a question on dairy breeds, in which students were given no options from which to identify the breeds from the information provided about milk yields and percentages of fat and protein.
There were many questions with a mix of topics, where students would expect just a single topic.
Mr Hynes cited an example of a question which was mostly about sheep and beef, into which grazing was introduced.
For ordinary-level students, Mr Hynes said short questions followed a similar format to past exams, and a good range of topics were covered in the long questions.
He welcomed choices within questions, such as the final one in which they could choose to answer on two topics from dairy, sheep, pigs, and photosynthesis.
The higher- and ordinary-level Leaving Certificate music papers were both considered straightforward by Siofra Cox of the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland.
She felt that students should have found questions about a movement from Mozart’s piano concerto in A major manageable as the main part of the listening test.
They would have been reasonably challenged by some parts of two listening questions that required them to compare excerpts with music which was not played in the exam.
This, Ms Cox said, tested their familiarity and their aural memory of the overall works.
A choice of questions in major and minor keys featured in the composition paper and each of these skills-based questions was quite manageable.
