Foundation level English was probably the toughest paper of all for Junior Cert students who started their exams yesterday morning.
Some questions were too difficult and the paper was a bit male centered, according to Mr John Mac Gabhann, TUI subject representative and English teacher at Tallaght Community College, Co Dublin. Spiders, the lions at Dublin Zoo, a poem about "my dad" and an extract, entitled "King of the Castle", from Robinson Crusoe featured in the Junior Cert English exam at foundation level.
"It's ever so slightly skewed towards the male candidate," Mr Mac Gabhann said. "Maybe a bit more care could be taken in the construction of the paper." He also said that the questions in sections on media studies and functional writing were "testing and rather too difficult for the cohort at which these are pitched".
Ms Sheila Parsons, ASTI subject representative and a teacher at Holy Faith De La Salle College in Skerries, Co Dublin, also said that the foundation level English exam was "more difficult than papers in the past". The media section was "particularly difficult", she said. "Each year there is a contingent of students who are serviced by the foundation level paper and it's important that the paper would serve their needs."
Mr Willie Lawlor, also an ASTI subject representative and a teacher at St Mary's Secondary School in Newport, Co Tipperary, said the media section of this paper was "far too sophisticated for the students and they were asked too many things".
Apart from some quibbles, the exam papers at both higher and ordinary level English were judged by teachers to be "good" and "accessible". Mr Lawlor said that overall both papers were straightforward and student-friendly. Ms Parsons said the poetry at ordinary level was "difficult enough".
At higher level, the examiners "have produced a succession of good papers (for the past couple of years). I have no particular complaints," said Mr Mac Gabhann. An extract from Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent was "suitably anarchic and accessible. There should not have been any difficulty. The questions were fair and reasonably searching," he said.
Ms Parsons felt that the Mississippi dialect in this piece could have posed problems for some students. The only real quibble Mr Mac Gabhann had with yesterday afternoon's higher level paper two was the section on poetry where the questions were "a bit flat" and "disappointing". "The questions didn't strike deeply enough at the generic imperatives of poetry. It didn't test their knowledge of the underlying concepts," he said. On the whole, the paper was "perfectly acceptable with nothing especially surprising", he said. The questions on Shakespearian drama were "quite relevant to the genre" and the piece from the Arthur Miller play was "suitably relevant to the current refugee situation", he said. He liked the excerpt from Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, which was "quite funny" and the questions were "demanding enough too".
The ordinary level paper was "marked by a determination to make the paper as accessible as possible" and "the piece by David Attenborough was reasonable with nothing especially difficult in it", Mr Mac Gabhann said.
