JUNIOR CERT SCIENCE:STUDENTS WHO had studied with the help of past examination papers would have been delighted with a "very reasonable" higher level science exam, according to teachers.
Science is one of the more popular subjects at Junior Cert level with more than 50,000 students sitting yesterday morning’s exam.
“My students were very pleased with the paper,” said TUI representative Carmel Crowley. “There was a good range of topics on the paper, but nothing that would have shocked students.
“They would have been familiar with all of these questions from previous years.”
“It would have been difficult for those borderline higher level students,” said ASTI representative Vincent McCarville. “There was certainly an emphasis on analysis and thinking, but overall students were happy with it.”
While the language in the paper was praised as being “straightforward”, Mr McCarville raised the eternal problem faced by students whose first language is not English.
“It’s not an English exam, but students for whom English isn’t their first language will struggle to do well, regardless of their science ability,” he said. “I don’t know how you fix that problem, but it is something that crops up.”
The paper was divided reasonably equally between questions on physics, chemistry and biology, with topics ranging from photosynthesis and the chemistry of water to magnetism and solar energy. “There was a time when biology questions were slightly easier than the ones in the other sciences,” Mr McCarville said. “There seems to have been a real effort over the years to balance that out, which is a welcome move.”
Ordinary level students faced a more challenging paper, according to Ms Crowley.
“It wasn’t an unfair test by any means,” she said. “There was just quite a lot of overlap of topics between the higher and ordinary level papers. Naturally the level of detail required wouldn’t be the same but the questions were similar.”
While the weaker students might have found the paper to be quite difficult, it was nothing the well-prepared student couldn’t handle. “Overall I thought the paper was a good test,” Ms Crowley said.
