The leaving cert system is not only unfair, it's illogical and it's getting worse.

reznov

imelle wrote: »

if it's on the syllabus you're meant to know it guys. . just because it never came up before doesn't mean it won't

That's fine.
But what they asked was generally the same for the past ten years.
A time for new beginnings!

DepoProvera

"Education Minister Ruairi Quinn told Morning Ireland that he had asked for predictability in the State exams to be looked at to ensure the bridge between secondary level and higher level education is strengthened. He added that such predictability had become a “big issue”. ....

Quinn, however, also moved to assure current Fifth and Sixth Year students that no changes will be implemented in the education system that would “change the path they are taking”.
The proposals outlined in the report will not take affect within the 2012 school year.

hmmmmm

_LilyRose_

imelle wrote: »

yep it was a Plath essay in the mock and i only wrote about Elm, Black Rook in Rainy Weather and Morning Song. and i only wrote a tiny bit on Morning Song at that. I got 47/50 for it.
We had the chief examiner in and he told us you can get A1 answers with 3 poems.
It's about answering the question and being relevant and quality. not how many you know

Wow. Interesting to know! My English teacher is evil though in the way she marks- I'm not exaggerating when I say she would fail you for leaving out a poem! I just finished 5th year, and we spent the whole year on Macbeth, three poets and a bit of comparative. She decides to give 10% of our summer grade to an essay (choice between short story or personal), despite not having done any paper 1 all year.

She failed about half the class (IN CREATIVE WRITING) and the highest was a C1 or C3 can't remember (which is good from her).

So we tend to just do what she says cos she's liable to fail you if she feels like it.

reznov

DepoProvera wrote: »

hmmmmm

A sign that next year will be worse. :cool:

Cruel Sun

Many of the Geography questions I do not recall being covered in the book.

Chevolution

The school system in this country is made to mould you into a worker. They dont want you to reach your full potential, the subject choices on the leaving cert course are poor and dont give you much life skills, they teach you to listen, take everything on the course as fact and dont question anything, take orders from the principal and teachers, they want to mould you into someone that can straight away go and work somewhere under orders,they teach you to follow, not lead.

imelle

i'm repeating this year, last year i relied on predictions for accounting and got a D1 in a subject i could have just as easily got a B1 in. but they put up different topics than everyone was predicting. so at the end of the day it was my own fault and if i had covered the course instead of being lazy and taking a chance i could have got a higher grade. sometimes we just have to learn from our mistakes and accept that yeah i'm disappointed i didn't do well, but the person who bothered to cover the course deserves the higher grade than me

imelle

_LilyRose_ wrote: »

Wow. Interesting to know! My English teacher is evil though in the way she marks- I'm not exaggerating when I say she would fail you for leaving out a poem! I just finished 5th year, and we spent the whole year on Macbeth, three poets and a bit of comparative. She decides to give 10% of our summer grade to an essay (choice between short story or personal), despite not having done any paper 1 all year.

She failed about half the class (IN CREATIVE WRITING) and the highest was a C1 or C3 can't remember (which is good from her).

So we tend to just do what she says cos she's liable to fail you if she feels like it.

class/homework assignments are always graded that bit harder than the Lc because the teachers know you have the book in front of them.
examiners aren't there to catch you out, they take your nerves and everything into account and the fact that on the day you produced that answer off your head

Mysteriouschic

I don't get why sec are trying to make the exams more harder than they already are. The LC is hard as it is and we have to know 6 subjects or 7.
If it gets and harder less people will be getting into university . An more people will be repeating each year just because of it.
They should have other systems in place like coursework for continuous assessment . I think the cao system should be more like the ucas system because it's annoying that you might miss your points by 5 or even 1 and then you miss your place. The ucas they get to review the personal statements there is still chances of getting in to the university it's up to the place to decide.

_LilyRose_

imelle wrote: »

class/homework assignments are always graded that bit harder than the Lc because the teachers know you have the book in front of them.
examiners aren't there to catch you out, they take your nerves and everything into account and the fact that on the day you produced that answer off your head

Yeah, I take solace in the fact that she won't be marking my Leaving! Good luck with the rest of yours anyway!

imelle

Mysteriouschic wrote: »

I don't get why sec are trying to make the exams more harder than they already are. The LC is hard as it is and we have to know 6 subjects or 7.
If it gets and harder less people will be getting into university . An more people will be repeating each year just because of it.
They should have other systems in place like coursework for continuous assessment . I think the cao system should be more like the ucas system because it's annoying that you might miss your points by 5 or even 1 and then you miss your place. The ucas they get to review the personal statements there is still chances of getting in to the university it's up to the place to decide.

no don't worry about that there's a bell curve so this won't happen. they'll grade papers easier and go back and add marks if there is a high fail rate or anything. they'll always have a certain number of people who get As,Bs,Cs,Ds etc so don't worry about the harder paper because they usually are marked easier so there won't be less people in university!

ardmacha

If it gets and harder less people will be getting into university

Perhaps if you cannot understand how the points system works, something that should be of interest, then you are not quite suited to university?

imelle

_LilyRose_ wrote: »

Yeah, I take solace in the fact that she won't be marking my Leaving! Good luck with the rest of yours anyway!

good luck to you next year! :P if you are worried you could always ask another teacher to grade your work just to get another opinion and see where you stand, but for now enjoy your summer hols

Mysteriouschic

ardmacha wrote: »

Perhaps if you cannot understand how the points system works, something that should be of interest, then you are not quite suited to university?

I mean other people will find it hard getting their points for people who want medicine and those types of high degrees.

shane7218

The leaving cert this year is an absolute disgrace and the SEC should be Ashamed of themselves. I spent hours of my time going over topics and they decide to experiment with papers and its not fair. The way some of the questions are phrased (English paper 2 comparative) make the students panic and often give poorer answers as a result. Serious questions need to be asked this year to the department of education as all they seem to be good at is making a bad thing worse!!!!

delta_bravo

I'm sorry that some of you are frustrated but you are incorrect in saying the SEC "experimented" and this sort of thing. The SEC examine a syllabus. That syllabus is available online and generally are fairly clear on what you need to know.

I teach Geography and nothing that came up on that exam was outside of the syllabus. There were a few issues with the Junior Cert exam this year but generally the Leaving exams were ok. Yes some of the questions may have been new to you but they were all on the syllabus. Your textbook is not the syllabus, some textbooks have too much information and some have not enough.

Predicting questions is a gamble, that should be clear to everyone. If you overdo focus on certain questions you may find yourself caught out.

As the financial ads say "Past performance is not a suitable indicator for future performance".

Slow Show

I'm not even doing the LC this year and that post made me feel oddly emotional.

GO AWAY PROJECT MATHS. NO ONE EVEN LIKES YOU.

randylonghorn

Zomg Okay wrote: »

I think the main problem the SEC have is that we don't learn the course, we learn "the exams" and they want to change that.

For fúck sake, the Leaving Cert. is completely vital to our futures and they want us to put it aside in favour of the course? Get real...

Except that people did learn the course much more in the past, before the invasion of the grind school culture in the past decade or so. Of course there was always a focus on the exams, but not to the same extent.

Then you had this rash of grind schools spring up which focussed totally on the exams and on predictions, and cut out large swathes of the course, and gurus who analysed every full stop on every paper for years and said "I predict X, Y and Z will come up this year!" ... and in fairness, the best of them at least were often right because the SEC had become too predictable.

Then students and parents started putting pressure on ordinary schools and teachers to teach the same way, i.e. totally focussed on the exams, and many eventually gave in to the pressure to some extent at least.

So the SEC started noticing this, and have been sending out broad hints for the last ~5 years that they intended to gradually make the papers less predictable ... long before Quinn ever became minister. And each year of the last 2 or 3 certainly there have been some small moves in that direction, and students and teachers complaining that X or Y was unfair because it didn't fit the predictions.

So when are people going to start reading the writing on the wall rather than blissfully ignoring it?

I'll be honest, I didn't think there was anything unfair or horrendous about English PII. I'm sorry for those students who banked heavily on Plath or / and Heaney, and who are upset, but the fact that they didn't come up doesn't make the exam unfair. Nor do I ascribe to the conspiracy theories about how the SEC took note of the predictions and changed the paper, that's not how the paper-setting works, it's a very long-drawn out process which has been going on since well before Christmas. The predictions were wrong, it's that simple.

I won't comment on geography because I don't have the background to do so, but I do acknowledge that many people seem to feel that there were a lot of unexpected twists in that one. That said, I see at least one geography teacher above disagreeing.

Togepi

randylonghorn wrote: »

I'll be honest, I didn't think there was anything unfair or horrendous about English PII. I'm sorry for those students who banked heavily on Plath or / and Heaney, and who are upset, but the fact that they didn't come up doesn't make the exam unfair. Nor do I ascribe to the conspiracy theories about how the SEC took note of the predictions and changed the paper, that's not how the paper-setting works, it's a very long-drawn out process which has been going on since well before Christmas. The predictions were wrong, it's that simple.

I agree 100% with all of this!

Paper 2 wasn't unfair, the poets people were counting on just didn't come up. It was pretty much 50/50 that they were going to, so I've no idea why people thought they'd get away with studying one or two poets out of eight.

QueenOfLeon

Mysteriouschic wrote: »

I don't get why sec are trying to make the exams more harder than they already are. The LC is hard as it is and we have to know 6 subjects or 7.

Not directed at you personally Mysteriouschic, but at all the posts similar to this which are cropping up everywhere these last few days. Every year there are a few shock papers that set people back. And every year people think that they are the first, and that the SEC are out to get them. When you look over past papers, the questions don't seem as difficult as the questions you are facing now in your papers, as your teachers, online resources and revision books have changed their content every year to cater to previous styles of questions.

The results this year will follow the same general trend as they always have, the bell curve. Marking schemes are adjusted if necessary. Most of you have only done 2/3 exams so far. At this point, you need to forget about the SEC conspiracy theories and concentrate on your next exams. They're not out to get you Come August, people will still get their 600's (or 625's, whatever :P), more than likely including some of you complaining here! :P

Bears and Vodka

Biscuits. wrote: »

I dropped to foundation on the day after seeing the ordinary paper.

I'm probably the only one who thought this was interesting.

He/she dropped to foundation on the day after seeing the OL paper? I was always told that once you get your answer booklet with the level sticker you cannot go back, never mind seeing the actual exam paper?

And as regards the thread, yeah LC is a lotta pressure and it's getting to you guys. I suppose if everyone does badly in the LC this year, colleges will drop their points and you will still get in? Colleges WANT to fill their places, it's their source of revenue.

Cruel Sun

subz3r0 wrote: »

I'm probably the only one who thought this was interesting.

He/she dropped to foundation on the day after seeing the OL paper? I was always told that once you get your answer booklet with the level sticker you cannot go back, never mind seeing the actual exam paper?

That was the first thing I noticed.

randylonghorn

subz3r0 wrote: »

I suppose if everyone does badly in the LC this year, colleges will drop their points and you will still get in? Colleges WANT to fill their places, it's their source of revenue.

It works even more simply than that, colleges don't raise or drop the points, the CAO computer simply fills X available places on a course with the X number of applicants for that course who got the highest points, and the points of the last person into the course then becomes what's known as the cut-off point which we see quoted in newspapers etc.

finality

subz3r0 wrote: »

I'm probably the only one who thought this was interesting.

He/she dropped to foundation on the day after seeing the OL paper? I was always told that once you get your answer booklet with the level sticker you cannot go back, never mind seeing the actual exam paper?

And as regards the thread, yeah LC is a lotta pressure and it's getting to you guys. I suppose if everyone does badly in the LC this year, colleges will drop their points and you will still get in? Colleges WANT to fill their places, it's their source of revenue.

Colleges do not set the points! I don't know where people are getting this idea from. Are ye not told how the points are calculated?

K_1

reznov wrote: »

Yeah tough **** to those who covered the course and still got caught out.
Numerous of my classmates who were predicted to obtain A1s in Geog have struggled and are fearing that they may not even get an A2.

I'm assuming the exams have thus far have been favourable to you?

Not particularly, the english questions were tough, but our teacher taught us about the actual texts a lot more than answering specific questions. Don't know anything about geography, but I'm presuming they didnt ask anything that wasnt on the syllabus?

Martin_94 wrote: »

Ruairi Quinn's username on boards= K_1

If you disagree with my opinion, reply to it.

Wesc.

finality wrote: »

Colleges do not set the points! I don't know where people are getting this idea from. Are ye not told how the points are calculated?

Wait what I don't get what you're trying to say here. Explain?

earwax_man

Biscuits. wrote: »

Why is our system so similar to America’s? Are we going to continue in that direction until we’re as badly off as them? In England you’re qualified if you’ve done your A levels, they’re not just a means to reach University like the leaving cert. They also study relevant topics for their A levels. Meaning no mandatory subjects. Like maths and Irish. I don’t want to repeat why this is a horrible idea, but I will come back to project maths and describe a predicament many of us find ourselves in.

The SEC and government have single-handedly destroyed the Irish language that they "feel so strongly about" to throw fists of money at. I know this is off topic, but the way that the whole language has been examined has caused generations of students to hate the language.

Gaeltachtaí regions in 1926


Versus in 2007


See the correlation?

Now, back to the OP's points.

Since the introduction of the feeder schools' culture within the past 10-15 years, the Leaving Certificate has become a total sham. For example, I went to revision courses in one such school at Easter and Christmas. The notes we got were pretty much a giant marking scheme. I don't even have to mention about definitions. They speak for themselves.

What is happening in this country?

Togepi

Wesc. wrote: »

Wait what I don't get what you're trying to say here. Explain?

See this post.

randylonghorn wrote: »

It works even more simply than that, colleges don't raise or drop the points, the CAO computer simply fills X available places on a course with the X number of applicants for that course who got the highest points, and the points of the last person into the course then becomes what's known as the cut-off point which we see quoted in newspapers etc.

QueenOfLeon

Wesc. wrote: »

Wait what I don't get what you're trying to say here. Explain?

Supply and demand, determined by the Leaving Cert points and the CAO system. The college set the minimum requirements and decide on extra assessments (portfolio, interview, etc), but have nothing to do with the points.

DepoProvera

earwax_man wrote: »

The SEC and government have single-handedly destroyed the Irish language that they "feel so strongly about" to throw fists of money at. I know this is off topic, but the way that the whole language has been examined has caused generations of students to hate the language.

Gaeltachtaí regions in 1926


Versus in 2007


See the correlation?

Correlation =/= Causality, this might help you on Monday

I'm no defender of compulsory Irish, but to attribute the decline of the language to it being compulsory is ridiculous.