Making the leaving harder??

PARARORY

I really think the Home Economics paper was unfair. I've been an A student in it since first year yet I still managed to find the paper difficult; it wasn't like any other year or sample paper and some of the questions weren't clear. I'm hoping the marking scheme will be in line with the awkwardness of the paper.

Totally agree with you about Home Ec, i was getting high grades all year , studied loads , puts loads of effort into then none of it paayed off!

It's one thing preparing a student for the exam but when HL Irish students having essays learnt off by heart, then it is not doing any favours for anyone

Learning off Irish essays/sample answers is a different story though - we aren't taught how to string a proper sentence together , the majority of teachers dont teach grammar properly ( as in feminine , masculine nouns, tuiseal ginideach etc.. ) they just do the bare bones of verbs

Sure if we aren't taught how to create proper grammaticaly correct sentences we have only two choices - do it our own way and get a sh*ite grade or learn off essays from grinds/teachers and get a reasonably good grade.

Its a fault with the syllabus and system rather than the students attitude!


English is different story alltogether - its absolutely pathetic that people learn off a composition piece and can get away with it- everyone here can string a grammatically correct sentence together but irish is completely different with all the seimhus, different endings when it comes to plurals etc..

LadyGaga!

PARARORY wrote: »

Totally agree with you about Home Ec, i was getting high grades all year , studied loads , puts loads of effort into then none of it paayed off!

Oh so glad you agree, everyone keeps saying how easy the paper was?? :O I knew like the book inside and out, was counting on an A1 and like I agree, nothing paid off. I may as well not have studied! What a waste

PARARORY

Oh so glad you agree, everyone keeps saying how easy the paper was?? :O I knew like the book inside and out, was counting on an A1 and like I agree, nothing paid off. I may as well not have studied! What a waste

Definitley was not an "easy" paper.. I have friends that come out of papers saying that it was "piss easy" etc.. then the results come and they get C's and D's so i wouldnt worry too much about it...

teachers in my school said the short questions were horrible , so specific and pointless!

It was one of those papers where if you left out a section in the book because you didnt like it you were REALLY screwed. q2 and q3 from the food studies were horrible and if you didn;t do all the budgeting/finance chapters you were done for!


Iron was very obvious though , I've been hearing that being predicted since September.. and I think that part of the question worked out at about 9 % of the whole paper

The way I see it is that it was better than last years paper with cobalamin & Quorn! If that came up most people would have automatically got 0 /35 or whatever marks it was!

fauxshow

randylonghorn wrote: »

How are they being punished though?

Well, here's just one example of how the SEC are punishing students who decide to go to the Institute. The Spanish, German and French oral examiners in the Institute threw ridiculous questions at most of the candidates this year... and I've heard this across the board from a lot of different people and teachers, it's notorious every year that examiners come in with a vendetta against grind schools. Students get sprung questions like ''Do you think it's very fair that just because you can pay seven grand a year you should get to go to a school like this?'', ''Do you not think that grind schools go against everything education stands for?'' etc. The Irish examiner this year was supposed to have been perfectly fair, but there were a lot of horror stories going around about the German one. A few people ended up upset after being sprung a series of obscure questions not remotely linked to anything they had brought up themselves within the first five minutes of their oral.


A lot of different people were talking about ridiculous questions being thrown at them and felt like they were almost being attacked in their oral, constantly being interrupted and not asked about any of the more normal topics etc.... because they were a student in a grind school as opposed to an exam number.

randylonghorn

Ok, I see your point.

I must have misunderstood you, I thought you were saying that the SEC making papers more unpredictable was punishing grind school students.

One point though ... I can guarantee you that that has nothing to do with the SEC. That's down to the individual examiners. And you're right, it's not on. Examiners should always maintain a neutral stance, regardless of their own personal opinions.

Whatever about asking about grind schools and educational philosophy in an oral (very borderline, at best) asking if they thought it was fair that people got to go to the IoE because they could pay is well out of order.

I've heard of that happening with "public" (i.e. private) schools in England, first time I've encountered it here.

Trackmedown

two words... home economics. hardest paper i had seen in years, totally unpredictable, really vaguely phrased Q1 which is like the most important question on the paper! one of the subjects i had worked really hard for and not one bit of that paid off but i suppose thats life!
but i wouldn't say all the other papers were like unbelieveably difficult when compared to the past papers, definately less predictable but not a huge jump in difficulty from prior years imo.

Bob the Builder

Well my Irish teacher went to one of these so-called institute's for the Oral Irish and she is a very fair woman I have to say with things like that. And her attitude is that if she went to another school and tortured their students, eventually our school would get a like-minded torturer.

All the same, she said to us she asked about ten students in a row how long they spent studying and whilst it may be thought she was interrogating them, she was just amazed that they did 6 or 7 hours study a day and most of my class did between 15mins to an hour.

randylonghorn

Bob the Builder wrote: »

All the same, she said to us she asked about ten students in a row how long they spent studying ...

That's quite a reasonable question, though, to any student.

PARARORY

That's quite a reasonable question, though, to any student.

Yeah but you have about 10 minutes to show off all the Irish you've ever learn - seems kind of a waste of a question as well as being extremely dull!

EuropeanSon

I hate the idea of grind schools. I want to learn about a subject, not an exam.

randylonghorn

PARARORY wrote: »

Yeah but you have about 10 minutes to show off all the Irish you've ever learn - seems kind of a waste of a question as well as being extremely dull!

Meh, 15-20 seconds worth, q&a, thrown in at the start in the "settling down" questions?

PARARORY

Meh, 15-20 seconds worth, q&a, thrown in at the start in the "settling down" questions?

Fair enough but the usual settling down questions are designed to set the pace of the conversation u know? They might ask you about ur area and then u go on about the facilities... if they ask u about how much study they do - theres only a few paths that the conversation can go down!

**Timbuk2**

People actually do their orals and exams in the IoE. There are people in my school that have gone to the IoE all year, but just for 6th year, and they did their orals and exams in our school (not the IoE). Does it have something to do with registering with a certain school?

spurious

There is no vendetta against grind schools, though I'm sure that won't stop people saying there is.

If I had been doing a language oral and had been asked 'difficult' questions, I would have been delighted as it means the examiner believed I was able for them. I'd be more worried if they had stuck to what the weather was like and what colour my jumper was.

JellyBeans92

PARARORY wrote: »

Learning off Irish essays/sample answers is a different story though - we aren't taught how to string a proper sentence together , the majority of teachers dont teach grammar properly ( as in feminine , masculine nouns, tuiseal ginideach etc.. ) they just do the bare bones of verbs.

Totally true.. I ended up dropping from HL before the mocks purely because I can't learn-off the essays, everything else was okish..

I only found out this year (after 14 years learning Irish on and off) that there are male and female nouns in Irish, and it wasn't any teacher that told me?

BrenosBolts91

Oh god no this year was far easier than last year. Its all relative

PARARORY

I ended up dropping from HL before the mocks purely because I can't learn-off the essays, everything else was okish..

I only found out this year (after 14 years learning Irish on and off) that there are male and female nouns in Irish, and it wasn't any teacher that told me?

Ha this is my point! After 6 years of secondary school the most grammar people come out with is regular and irregular verbs !

JellyBeans92

PARARORY wrote: »

Ha this is my point! After 6 years of secondary school the most grammar people come out with is regular and irregular verbs !

If I even understood that much I'd be doing well?! XD

I'll freely admit I didn't understand most of what I wrote on my JC paper 3 years ago, one of the questions was an essay on the book "Dunmharu ar an Dart" that our teacher had made everyone learn off, and then stand up and regurgitate every class for about 2-3 month in 2nd year.

The other was on a poem I learnt off about an hour before the exam.. still don't know what it was about, but i still managed a C in HL!

Sad reflection on the education system, we've all learned nothing much but how to regurgitate nonsense and getting lucky with predictions.

PARARORY

Sad reflection on the education system, we've all learned nothing much but how to regurgitate nonsense and getting lucky with predictions.

You couldnt be more right , hate the way parents/adults/even teachers give out to us for learning off essays and regurgitating them when we arent taught how to come up with stuff ourselves ( this is specifically about Irish btw )

And with regards to predictions - the majority of posts I've seen ( well over a hundred at this stage) start off with saying " well my teacher said..."

Most of the predictions start with the teachers!

JellyBeans92

PARARORY wrote: »

And with regards to predictions - the majority of posts I've seen ( well over a hundred at this stage) start off with saying " well my teacher said..."

Most of the predictions start with the teachers!

I know, especially with the Eavan Boland incident.. I was one of the people who originally said that Rich would come up this year, bc she was on the leaked paper last year (I didn't really care bc I just wanted Eliot on the paper).
I opened the paper and had the biggest grin on my face when I saw Boland wasn't there, teaches that you should never try to shortcut the shortcut.

And with the Bio paper, I had this "feeling" about the heart disection 10mins before the exam and learnt it off.. Genuinely didn't see TWO short questions from Microbiology coming though! (Least they were easy enough)


I think it's totally rediculious though that I could get through HL then OL Irish without being able to understand most of the books?! I don't think there's any other subject where you can get away with crap like that?!

fauxshow

spurious wrote: »

There is no vendetta against grind schools, though I'm sure that won't stop people saying there is.

If I had been doing a language oral and had been asked 'difficult' questions, I would have been delighted as it means the examiner believed I was able for them. I'd be more worried if they had stuck to what the weather was like and what colour my jumper was.

Well of course difficult questions are welcome, I was delighted when I was pushed into a question during my Spanish oral that meant I had to use the impefect subjunctive, or when my examiner grilled me on trickier topics during my Irish oral. But there is a line between hard questions that test your ability and asking very obscure things that are clearly beyond the ability of the student or even an appropriate thing to bring up in the context of an oral exam... I'm not saying that everyone is against grind schools, but there just seems to have been a few examiners in recent years who go in with a certain idea in their head, and some poor students end up being victim to that!

rainbowtrout

**Timbuk2** wrote: »

People actually do their orals and exams in the IoE. There are people in my school that have gone to the IoE all year, but just for 6th year, and they did their orals and exams in our school (not the IoE). Does it have something to do with registering with a certain school?

No nothing at all. If you go to a 'grind' school it is not a recognised secondary school in the same sense as a regular school is. So you are registered as an external candidate. Any IoE/Yeats College etc student on here will verify that their exam number begins with 18XXXX, as all external candidates have these numbers. You can choose to sit your exams in the grind school or sit them in another school. When you are filling in your LC form with your subjects I think it's at that point that you nominate where you are going to sit the exams. While the majority of IoE students are from Dublin, there are quite a proportion from around the country who would prefer to be at home in Tipperary or Monaghan or Mayo sitting their exams and being able to go home every evening after them, so they can apply to their local school to sit their exams their. The school isn't obliged to accommodate them though.

Some external candidates - I'm not talking specifically grind school candidates - do try to play the system to their advantage. I've seen it in ag science, where they'll register in one school for their ag practical, in another school for their french oral and in another school for something else. Often picking schools where the cohort might be weaker than average which would make them look good in comparison and in the case of grind schools where there is a lot of competition and the standard would be fairly high, less competition with a large cohort of students going for A1s.

LC2010HIS

Op - YES!!!
i dunno about every one else but i found this with biology HL - was gutted with it TBH
My bio teacher was looking at it stupid. Same with french.
Everyone in my year said the choice subjects were desperate!

leavingcert 2010

im also repeating this year, and ii fiound this years papers so far, were much harder than last years

English:i thought was good, poetry messed me up, but it was MY fault for only learning longley and boland

Irish:im happy as long as i pass

Maths: i did all questions for studing from 09-96, i know that this years paper was the easiest maths paer in a long time

Buisness:short questions had alot from units 6 and 7, and ABQ was quite hard,but overall the questions were easy enough but were too long, i couldnt finish papereven though i had my head down, writing throughout the wole exam, left out one whole long question, and in 5min wrote all the main bullet points for the last 60 mark question
also last year buisness was my only A1, this year because of time, i think lost my A1 this year

Biology:short questions and experiment were good, but long questions were........challenging.DNA question was badly worded, and ecology question i though was unnecasirly complicated, so i didnt do it, the rest of the questions were nice though(apaprt from the reflex diagram),that caught me out


i have accounting physics and chemistry left(im trying my best to study for all 3 of those )