Leaving Certificate Paper 1

After, as they say, a year like no other, candidates at last arrived in examination centres this morning to start on a unique Leaving Certificate. Pressure this year was reduced by the provision of Accredited Grades as a ‘backstop’ to the exams, and by the considerable modifications made to exam rubrics in every subject.

In Paper 1 English, this meant dropping one part of Section 1 (Comprehending), so candidates were faced with a now-massive level of choice: just one of 6 pieces between comprehensions and short compositions, with both reduced to 40 marks. The main composition remained compulsory, and still worth 100 marks, which meant that its already significant place (25% of everything) became yet more important this year (100/280, or 36%). The changed rubric also meant a huge provision of time, some of which candidates should have taken up in making an intelligent choice between those 6 options, and some in planning more thoroughly their main composition.

Time, coincidentally or not, was the theme of the Higher Level Paper 1 (in a year when candidates may have felt time was moving more slowly than ever as they waited to escape school). It was a paper of a good level of quality, starting with two fine but very different Irish authors: John Banville was represented not by one of his novels but by an excerpt from his ‘Dublin Memoir’ Time Pieces. The first comprehension question was mirrored across all three extracts, asking candidates to write about ‘three insights you gained into the impact of time on memories’, a subtly more challenging task than the functional information retrieval tasks which normally appear in this place. There was no reference back to the literature course this year.

It was a pleasure to see in the second piece an extract from Doireann Ní Gríofa’s brilliant award-winning A Ghost in the Throat, about which I wrote here (though candidates only knowing this, about her garden, would have no concept of the true reach of the book itself). The third piece was definitely of the moment, being part of the late Chadwick Boseman’s speech at the famous Howard University to students graduating in 2018. Boseman died tragically young only in August of last year. Along with Question B from Text 1 (on the purposes of monumental statues, in a week that Edward Colston has come back into the news) and the appearance of the Irish-Zambian star Denise Chaila at Ordinary Level, the setters clearly made a conscious effort to reflect recent times.

Candidates, in making their choice in Section 1, might well have decided the shorter B composition involved less, and had fewer pitfalls than the comprehension questions (three final Qs on ‘four features of the language of narration’,‘four features of the aesthetic use of language’, ‘four features of the language of persuasion’: fair to ask this, but candidates needed to be totally sure of what they were doing).

And so to the major Compositions (36%, remember). The personal and discursive essays here were open and attractive. However, what has become a trend in recent years was really capped: frankly often bizarre narrative scenarios that a candidate would want to be very confident to tackle without advance planning.

Write a short story, set in a railway station, in which a passenger off the overnight ferry from Fishguard in Wales plays an important role. Your short story may be amusing or menacing in tone.

or

Write a fable or fairy-tale, set in ancient Ireland, in which a bee or bees feature prominently.

I’d avoid.

The Ordinary Level paper retained the same time and marking structure as the Higher one, and time may have stretched yet more for those candidates. The paper will have upset no-one. Under the theme of music, there was an interview with Denise Chaila by Lauren Murphy, followed by the alternative of writing a review of an album or music-related book. Then came a quirky account of the artificially-manufactured pop-star Hatsune Miku, with Question B on ‘three most important inventions ever’ (a bit of fun) and finally an illustrated piece on shared musical experiences (Electric Picnic, classical music, football chanting). The final option was on writing the text for a podcast about your favourite music (why podcast?). The main compositions provided plenty of opportunity even if they were a little dull for the most part, though again the narrative options seemed unnecessarily convoluted, like their Higher Level counterparts:

Write a short story in which Hatsune Miku, the turquoise-haired virtual singer who is pictured in Text 2, escapes from her computerised world into the human world.

Off you go so, budding Kazuo Ishiguros (by the way, his recent Klara and the Sun starts well but is in the end a disappointment).

Paper 2 review here.

[A later post on Rote Learning in the Leaving Certificate is here].