Well The Leaving Cert 2010 is finally over, so i just thought I’d make my last post short and sweet.

Good luck to everyone who read these blogs and to everyone who sat the leaving cert this year. I hope you all do great at every subject you took (and judging on the blogs I’ve read on this site, we’re all heading towards A1s in English :L)

And thank you to Patrick Barry, who gave us all the chance to blog our leaving cert fears, panics and hopes. Without which some of us may have had panic attacks. People need to vent!

Good luck everyone, all the best, John.

Chemistry: not as impossible as it could have been!

I can hardly believe it, the exam I’ve been dreading for two years is finally over. Never again will I have to read over chemistry notes, never again will I have to study theorems and definitions for hours on end. It’s finally over. Anyway, for those of you who don’t do chemistry and wouldn’t be able to pick it out of a police line-up, here’s a brief layout of the paper:

The chemistry leaving cert exam paper is composed of two sections, A and B. In part A, there are three questions, of which two must be answered. In part B, there are eight questions, the amount of which are compulsory depending on how many questions you answered in part A. Eight questions must be answered overall.

In part A I answered all Three questions. The first one was easy, a simple titration, exactly the same one that came up the last three or four years. Question two was difficult enough, but I gave it my best shot. Question three wasn’t as easy as question one, but not as hard as question two. The reason I answered all three questions in this part of the exam was to leave more options open for me in part B.

Question four in part B was a series of eleven short questions, of which we had to answer around eight. I’m not entirely sure how many are compulsory as I always answer all of them to be on the safe side. questions five to eight were hard enough, but not impossible. After I had finished question eight I relaxed and sailed through questions nine to eleven, as they were just extra.

I’m still in shock that I managed to answer everything on the paper. I was expecting a C out of this exam but now I think I might have achieved more out of it.

For all the build up and tension not only I, but most Irish chemistry students have had over the past two years, it wasn’t nearly as impossible as I had expected. In fact, I might even go so far as to say it was (dare I say it?) easy. now it’s just music to go and then freedom!

Good luck with your remaining exams (if you have any), John.

Well, that’s all of the mandatory exams out of the way! All that’s left now are the option ones(e.g. sciences, music etc.) and I for one feel that we were given one of the easiest leaving certs ever given, and that we are extremely lucky to have been given the amount of walkovers and do able exams that we were.

While I havent done all of the exams so far which a lot of people do, I’ve certainly done most of them and the ones I didn’t take, I heard about from my over-talkative friends. So here’s how the mandatory exams have gone, as I see it:

English Paper One (H): A very easy exam overall. Interesting extracts(the one I answered on, Farenheit 451, was so interesting that i’m buying the book when all this is over!), good choice of part A’s and B’s, and as for the essay titles we were spoilt for choice.

English Paper Two (H): This paper was do able, but not the walkover that paper one was. The King Lear question was thankfully quite easy. The Literary Genre question was not the best question in the world, but not impossible. As for the poetry section, I know that most of us were hoping for Boland or Longley in the seen poetry question but thankfully I had Kavanagh prepared so I was happy enough. The unseen poetry was easy, as we all expected.

Geography (H): This paper was a complete walkover. The short questions were simple, as was every part A question. The part C of my regional geography was identical to my final question, I answered both on Belgium as a cultural region affected by language. Overall, no real problems.

Maths Paper One (O): This was hard for me, as I’m not exactly brilliant at maths. I know I passed, but I’m not too sure whether I achieved my (albeit red) honour or not. I heard that the honours paper was extremely easy compared to previous years.

Maths Paper Two (O): This was definitely easier than paper one, but still no walk in the park. Questions one, five, six and seven were easy. In part B, my class prepared question eleven but I went for question ten on the day as it just needed common sense and a bit of logic to solve. I probably did manage to get my honour, but we’ll see come August.

Irish Paper One (O): I was very happy with this paper as the scéal and litir which I learnt off fit perfectly into the titles given to us (regretting bringing your friend on holiday for the scéal, offering your friend a job in your parents “teach ósta” for the litir). The comprehensions were simple. After all, it’s only ordinary level.

Irish Paper Two (O): When I saw that An Bhean Óg and Clare Sa Spéir came up, I was ecstatic. Then completely ignored Clare Sa Spéir and answered on An Cearrbhách Mac Cába instead, still have no idea why. Then I looked at the poems on offer. Jack and Faoiseamh A Gheobhadsa. Of course I was going to answer on Jack, who wouldn’t? After reading over the questions on Jack however, I realised I didn’t understand them so i had to write about how your man from the Aran Islands hated Dublin. Since I’m from Dublin, i was overjoyed to explain why it’s a migraine-inducing hole. :/ the compulsory poem, Gealt, was incidentally the only compulsory poem I prepared so I guess I was lucky there. (Hopefully) heading towards a red B in this exam.

French (H): This was the easiest paper I’ve ever taken. Everything tipped came up and I shocked myself by nearly running out of room in each long question I answered. The comprehensions were an utter walkover, real junior-cert pass standard here. The listening exam was easy enough too, the only section giving me any trouble being section three. (And for section five, question three, “why is a french toy company taking a toy off the market”, the answer was because the remote control didnt work. I said it was because they were infected. I’ve been watching too many horror films before bed it seems.)

Business: While I don’t do business, I’ve heard from other students that it was impossible, nothing they’d prepared came up. Glad I don’t do it

History: This exam still isn’t finished, but I imagine it’s the usual history story; topics nobody had ever heard of came up and many a tear was shed. Honestly, why anyone would take this subject by choice is beyond me.

So, that’s it! I’ll be on after chemistry next week to have a big mope about how impossible it was. Until then, good luck with whatever options you have chosen(and if you do biology, I’m looking forward to my lie in tomorrow morning ).

I’m sure all of you would agree with me if i were to say that our first week of exams was, while I wouldn’t go so far as to call it easy, certainly a lot less difficult than it was made out to be. After the urgent, incessant cramming we all went through, The Leaving Cert: Week One might even have been a bit of a relief to some. Well todays message was: THIS is where the going gets tough.

The first week began on a high with one of the easiest English paper ones ever seen. On the Thursday, though a lot of us were hoping for Boland/Longley(whose absenses from paper two sparked several humourous facebook groups), English paper two was still undeniably quite do able. Then on the Friday it was just maths paper one and then the weekend, unless you’re a geography student as i am. Even allowing for the fact that friday was a full day for us geography students, the actual paper itself was so simple that it hardly comes into account. So we all had a pleasant weekend, thinking that this leaving cert thing wasnt half as bad as it was made out to be. Think again.

Monday morning at nine thirty we sat in the exam hall, sitting back in our seats, relaxed into a false sense of security by the walkover of a week just gone. Maths paper two was handed out. Section A, seven long questions choose five. Section B, four long questions choose one. Bam. The gentle start was most certainly over.

Two and a half hours later we were given ninety minutes to recuperate, before being thrown into a world of Irish stories, letters and quotes. Two comprehensions, five questions on each worth ten marks. Story and letter, sixty marks each. Asked for at least three quarters of an A4 page for both the story and letter, but expected to do far more.

After just half a hours break(or only ten minutes break if you do honours Irish!!) we were given our third exam of the day; The Irish Aural. This went on for fourty minutes, with some of the most confusing accents known to man. It was generally do able, but some of the speakers(especially the last one) might have been sean nós singing their lines for all i knew.

Finally, we were allowed to stumble home to prepare for irish paper two, starting 9:30am sharp tomorrow morning. We are well and truly into it now.

Best of luck with the nightmare of exams to come, John.

Well, it’s officially begun.

Woke up this morning, not exactly feeling like P Diddy, but pretty darn close to it!
For two weeks i had done nothing but spend hours up in my room, desperately cramming what seemed to be an endless stream of notes into my head, and finally the moment had come for me to put them to use.
Went downstairs and had breakfast, going over and over sample essays in my head, and headed off to school.

The exam hall was threatening to say the least, but the fact that i was surrounded by nearly 200 fellow sufferers made it that much easier. After opening the paper and looking through it, i found it hard not to cry out in joy as not one, but TWO short story essay options were provided. Also, a letter was one of the part Bs! I was ecstatic.

The A question went without a hitch as expected. I did the one on text three, an extract from a novel based in a future where books and intellectual people were not allowed, and books were burnt every Monday, Wednesday and Friday by professional book-burners.

The letter was the part B of text two. I found this rather difficult as it required us to write a letter intended to be discovered in the year twenty-fifty. Therefore, I reasoned there was no need for addresses. What use would my address be to somebody fourty years from now? Who on earth would I address it to? All in all, i felt i did alright in this section. Perhaps not fifty out of fifty, but close enough.

I decided to do the first short story essay, number three; “isn’t it funny, but sad?” as it seemed a more open title than the other one, number seven(in which one had to describe two eccentrics meeting for the first time). My essay wasn’t up to my usual standard, i felt, but I’m sure i got a good few marks out of it.

I hope you all had the same experience as me, that it wasn’t the hardest exam in existence and was actually quite do-able.

Best of luck, John.