THOSE WHO finished the Leaving Cert with agricultural science exams yesterday morning would have been reasonably contented with long, if occasionally quite challenging papers at both levels.
“There were a few questions on the higher level paper that may have challenged students,” said Donal Power, agricultural science teacher at the Institute of Education.
“Question 2 was very specific and quite difficult,” said ASTI subject representative Peter Keaney. “It’s a bit of a shame, given that soil is such an important area, a question like that could turn students off.”
The experiments question (question 4) asked students to describe two out of four suggested experiments. “The problem with this is that agricultural science does not have a specific number of prescribed experiments like biology or chemistry does,” explained Séamus Hynes of the TUI. “You could be asked about any four of between 100 and 150 experiments which isn’t really practical.” Almost every question at higher level appeared to have some form of sting in the tail. “It was a reasonably fair paper,” said Mr Hynes. “But there were difficult parts in questions that might have looked fine at a glance.”
At ordinary level, TUI representative James Conway said, “there was a very broad range of topics asked and there were parts of questions that ordinary level students would have found challenging . . . There were definitely some sticky ones.”
