Junior Cert students put isolines, erosion, soils, crustal plate boundaries and the role of women (!) under the microscope in yesterday's geography exams. Mr John Mulcahy, president of the ASTI and a geography teacher at Bishopstown Community College in Cork, said that the higher level was "a quite demanding paper on young students".
The 20 questions in section one were "quite complicated and tended to go towards verbal reasoning and logic. This would have taken a certain amount of time to work out", he said. "On the whole to do it all in two hours would have left students feeling fairly pushed."
However, said Mr Mulcahy, everything was relevant to the course. "There was no difficulty that way but answering the questions would have involved covering a huge amount of the course. A question on the role of women showed "the scope of geography nowadays".
The ordinary level paper had "a good clear lay out", he said. "Almost all the questions had a graphical lead in", which helped students by providing a good stimulus to answer the questions. Great care had obviously been taken in the wording of the questions, he said.
Ms Eilish McKenna, a geography teacher at Bailieboro Community School in Co Cavan, said that "the students were very happy with both papers". The ordinary level paper was "presented in a good clear way" and the higher level was "a very good paper".
Ms Rose Malone, education officer with the TUI, said that there was concern among teachers yesterday about the mapping and interpretation questions at both levels.
On the higher level paper the mapping question was not a full question as has generally been the case in the past. Instead it was spread over two questions. Environmental and social studies: Ms Geraldine Cleary, who teaches environmental and social studies at Killinarden Community School, Tallaght, Dublin, said that the ordinary level paper was "a difficult paper because of the vocabulary in the extracts". In particular, she mentioned the extracts in question 2, concerning the Plantation of Ulster.
Students found that some of the instructions in question 3 (b) "were not precise", said Ms Cleary. "It wasn't clear that they only had to write about either World War I or World War II." On a positive note, she said that "the lay out of the paper is more acceptable because it is more spaced and the presentation was easier".
The higher level paper, too, had a good, clear lay out, she said. The paper was challenging in that "it certainly required the students to have a higher level of ability than in the ordinary paperf".
