STATE EXAMS: Students urged to stay in exams for longer
Sheila Curley noticed more Junior Certificate students than usual had left the exam centre yesterday morning at St Aidan’s Community College in Dublin Hill on Cork’s northside, either after the 30 minutes that the rules oblige them to stay inside, or soon after. Most, she said, were ordinary level students whose maths exam was scheduled to run for two hours.
She sent a group text to parents of exam students at the school — where almost 100 are doing Junior Certificate and the same doing Leaving Certificate — asking them to advise their children to stay to the end.
“We always tell students that the exams aren’t set for two hours if they can be finished in half an hour, and it’s no good thinking of an answer walking down the road after leaving early,” she said.
“I think half an hour is a bit short, if they had to stay longer, they might do a bit more,” Ms Curley said.
While State Examinations Commission rules allow any student to leave an exam half an hour after they begin, she said the school requires students to sign out after leaving so they can keep parents informed.
Meanwhile, feedback about last Friday’s tough Leaving Certificate ordinary level maths Paper 1 will be sent to the State Examinations Commission by the Irish Maths Teachers’ Association.
Chairman Brendan O’Sullivan said a council meeting tonight will take reports from branch meetings and forward views to those finalising the marking scheme, in the expectation that particularly hard questions would have their marks amended and students would get marks for substantial attempts at them.
But, he said, suggestions that some ordinary level Paper 1 questions were the same as past higher level questions were unfair. Although they looked new to some students, he said, the course has changed for ordinary level over recent years.
