LEAVING CERT BUSINESS: HIGHER AND ORDINARY LEVEL:LEAVING CERT students sitting down to the higher level business paper had no time to waste yesterday afternoon.
While the paper was straightforward and fair, according to teachers, it was far from a walkover.
“Students got it done,” said William Murphy of the Institute of Education. “But there was no extra time for messing around.”
Overall, well-prepared students would have been pleased with what was a fair but searching paper that tested the students’ knowledge, said ASTI subject representative John McDonnell.
The short questions at the beginning of the paper were “quite nice”, according to ASTI subject representative Peter Quinn, a verdict that was echoed by other teachers.
The applied business question (ABQ) was reasonably challenging, but students who stuck to the question would have managed reasonably well, said Mr Quinn. However, there was no room for straying from the subject.
He agreed the ABQ was tricky in parts, but that “it was reasonably straightforward otherwise”.
There were no shocks in the longer questions. “The break-even chart would have been predicted and that came up. Business is such a huge course that anything can appear, so making predictions can be tricky.”
There were some topical questions on the paper, including one on how business in Ireland today could become more environmentally responsible, and another on Europe and its institutions, said Mr McDonnell.
“Questions four and five on the paper were a different style of question to what students would be used to.”
One of the questions to which Mr McDonnell referred asked students about the characteristics of entrepreneurs, while the other was about human resources management.
“Those questions required students to apply their knowledge. They would have suited students with a good understanding of the course,” Mr McDonnell said.
Overall, the long questions were “taxing enough”, according to Mr Quinn. “Students needed to be careful about which questions they chose. There were certain parts of certain questions that might have caught them out. Students looking for an A might have found that difficult.”
Almost 20,000 students sat the Leaving Cert business paper yesterday, over three-quarters of whom sat the higher level paper.
For the 4,000 students at ordinary level, the paper was largely uncomplicated. One variation on previous years emerged in question 6(a), according to Mr Murphy, in which students were asked to write a memo.
“In the past, students would have been given the layout of the memo on the paper and they filled in the details. Here they had to draw it up from scratch which might have thrown the weaker students,” Mr Murphy said.
Mr McDonnell said the ordinary-level paper gave students a “good choice of questions”.
