STATE EXAMS 2015: Stargazing on first day of Junior Cert

Stargazing and astronomy featured in the opening exam for 45,000 Junior Certificate students taking higher level English yesterday.

Thu, 04 Jun, 2015 - 01:00

Niall Murray, Education Correspondent

A reading passage about Irish astronomer Mary Bruck opened the paper, one of two set for those at higher level, while ordinary and foundation level student had just one paper.

Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (ASTI) English spokesman Fintan O’Mahony said the extract was a good opening passage, with fine questions that raised no major difficulties. He said an option to write a humorous school magazine article was likely to be chosen by many students. However, he said, many of the other personal essay-writing choices would not have been too challenging either.

The other composition subjects to pick from included ‘breaking the mould’, skills that students were proud to have developed, stargazing, and a story entitled ‘Change’ to include a character whose priorities change and a hopeful conclusion.

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He felt a functional writing choice to compose customer service guidelines for a supermarket went outside the normal expectation, but it was interesting nonetheless. The alternative was to write a report on a class survey about eating habits.

The media studies section included what Mr O’Mahony considered a good mix of old and new media; one on a newspaper editorial about last year’s ‘ice bucket challenge’, the other on a film review website.

Teachers’ Union of Ireland (TUI) subject spokesman Ollie Power thought the Mary Bruck article was one of the most difficult he had seen at this level. Otherwise, there was nothing too unexpected, he said.

An exception, however, might have been the customer service guidelines task which Mr Power felt was not something many or any classes would have been prepared for.

He felt the studied drama question on the afternoon higher level paper featured a requirement for the first time that students had to answer on production, an aspect normally avoidable by students. He was surprised that one of two unseen poems, a first in itself in his opinion, was Tennyson’s The Eagle, as many students would have studied it already and were therefore precluded from answering on it in later poetry questions.

Mr O’Mahony said the higher level Paper 2 was more difficult than the morning exam, with similar questions on either of the two unseen dramas, but an interesting question on characters in the studied play. He thought the Tennyson poem was nice and short, but the second unseen poem had some quite difficult language.

Asking about sense of place in the studied poetry section was something Mr O’Mahony thought students might not have understood well, but he said the studied fiction section had a nice question about characters’ strengths and weaknesses.

The ordinary level exam for Junior Cert English students began with an article about the song Let It Go from the film Frozen, which Mr O’Mahony thought students would have been happy with. He said the poem Time To Dust The Daffodils was not very easy while the drama section ended nicely with a question about a friendship between characters in a play or film.