Monday’s Leaving Cert classical studies (higher level) exam paper pushed students for time given the volume of writing involved and some challenging themes.
However, Tagdh McHugh, classical studies teacher at The Institute of Education, said it was a “fair paper overall”.
A more “writing-focused” section A this year may have put student under pressure to manage their time, he said, while questions in both section A and B ranged from straightforward to more complex in terms of language.
Kim Boland, classical studies teacher at Gorey Community School and ASTI subject representative, said the paper offered “lots of opportunities for well prepared students to show off their knowledge”.
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She noted there was “definitely a lot of material that has come up before”, which weaker students would be happy to see.
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Section A
Ms Boland said Section A provided “a good balance between visual and textual stimulus questions”, demonstrating “an awareness of different types of learners.”
The paper employed “lots of stimulus tools that students were probably quite familiar with, that they would have seen in class before.”
Mr McHugh said students found a fair mix of questions that would have rewarded those students that were prepared.
language can be tricky at times and calls for students to pay attention to the language of the questions and answer all parts of the question,” he said.
Most questions had a nice mix of content checking questions designed to assess students’ knowledge and more in-depth analysis questions designed to assess students’ understanding of the course content.
“This results in a section A that strikes a nice balance in each question between assessing knowledge and assessing skills/understanding,” he said.
“Where students might struggle is with their timing in this section as each question is more writing-focused than previous years.”
This meant there was less time per question for students to collect their thoughts and ideas before writing the more detailed (b) and (c) sections of questions.
Section B
Section B was “a bit tougher” than previous years, he said.
The mandatory question 11’s theme was philosophy, a section that most students might not be the most comfortable with given the complexity of the ideas involved.
“Those that were clear on the tenants of stoicism and epicureanism and were able to identify examples of both from Horace’s odes would have performed well in question 11 A,” he said.
“The choice of questions for 11 B were broad enough to give students options but would reward those who were very familiar with Plato’s Crito and the arguments therein. The language of the questions was straightforward and accessible and should not have prevented a barrier to students.”
Later in the exam paper, students were given five questions of which they had to answer one.
“These were, for the most part, straightforward and accessible questions that most students who were very familiar with some of the courses most prevalent themes should not have had too much difficulty with,” he said.
Mr McHugh said question 14 and 15 in particular were “uncomplicated questions that many students would have been pleased to see on the paper”.
“The only question I feel might have given students difficulty is question 16 due to the verbose nature of the quote; this might have confused some students as to what the question was actually asking them to address,” he said.
