The German Junior Cert examiners came in for a bit of praise yesterday. The layout of the ordinary level paper was clear and the print was of a good size, noted Ms Siobhan Supple, who teaches at St Louis High School, Rathmines, Dublin. "This is something we've asked for several times," she said. The fact that the examiners had scaled down the number of facts demanded on the listening comprehension section was also welcome. "They've got it just right and it was very fair," she said.
According to Mr Helmut Sundermann, who teaches at St Killian's German School, higher level students were happy with the paper. However, the reading comprehension involved more reading than normal, he said. Question F, Schule im Fernsehen, was challenging. However, students with a good command of English could make their way through the text more easily than others, Ms Supple noted.
Students at the Ursuline convent in Waterford, emerged from their exams happy and pleased, according to their teacher, Ms Eleanor Jones.
Higher-level students were relieved to discover that yesterday's paper was easier than the mock exams, she said. They were unprepared, however, for the short note about selling a bicycle, which Ms Jones described as "difficult but do-able".
On the ordinary-level paper, that section was the only black spot, she said. Students were asked to transfer written information into a timetable. In the past, they had done it the other way around.