Students had paper ‘less than a minute’

STUDENTS who were given the wrong English papers at a Drogheda school on Wednesday morning had less than a minute to read the questions before having them taken away again.

A Leaving Certificate candidate at St Oliver’s Community College claimed they were told to turn the exam sheets over and put them to the side of their desks as soon as another student said aloud that it was Paper II instead of Paper I.

“I didn’t even realise it at first. On Paper I, it usually says the theme of the paper and I was just looking for that across the front cover and couldn’t find it. Somebody just piped up and said, ‘This is paper two’, and immediately it was snapped up, taken off us. I didn’t get a chance to open it,” the girl told Joe Duffy on RTÉ’s Liveline radio programme.

Asked how long the estimated 30 students had the paper, she replied: “It probably wasn’t even a minute.”

The Co Louth VEC school, where more than 400 students are sitting the Leaving and Junior Certificate exams, stressed that the superintendent who issued the wrong papers is not a member of staff in the college. This is in line with State Examinations Commission policy that superintendents are not assigned to supervise exams in their own school.

“The school principal was alerted of this matter yesterday afternoon via a phone call from a parent of one of the examination candidates.

“The principal immediately brought this matter to the attention of the State Examinations Commission in order to protect the integrity of the examinations,” the school said in a statement.

The principal Dan Toole issued a printed version of the statement to journalists at the school gates yesterday, accompanied by Co Louth VEC chief executive Pádraig Kirk.

The student said she couldn’t believe when she heard on Wednesday night about the exam being put back to Saturday because of what happened in her exam centre.

“I have to say I wouldn’t put the school at any fault and the man, he made a mistake. It was a big mistake and it has caused a lot of uproar and a lot of changes to be made but there’s no point in pointing the finger,” she said.

Another caller to Liveline told how he had returned to take the Leaving Certificate English 60 years after dropping out of school, but he now has to cancel a holiday to Portugal as he had been scheduled to fly from Dublin on Saturday.