Trying to learn from the past with the Leaving Cert exam past papers

BY this time of year they were dog-eared. Full of scribbles. The first one you had attempted, months ago, had seemed so simple and trivial. You had bigger fish/questions to fry/answer.

The Leaving Cert exam past papers. A book of documents with harps on them. The paper statement that said ‘funtime’s over.’ As the school year waned and time ran out, you flicked through the years and tried to spot patterns. “If [that] came up in [that year], what’s the likelihood it will come up again?” They should just create a new subject — a mixture of maths, psychology and current affairs — so that you could successfully predict what’s coming up on other papers depending on a number of critera.

Leaving Certificate examination: Examinology Question 1: Given the following information — Yeats hasn’t come up in four years, but there’s a centenary next year. Yer man in the department’s from Sligo and YOU haven’t done a tap — what are the chances of ‘Lake Isle of Inisfree’ being a ‘BANKER’ this year?