Leaving Cert 2007 - English

Today saw some 50,000 Leaving Certificate students pour into over 4000 exam centre’s around the country for the start of the State Exams 2007. English was the flavour of the morning and afternoon and candidates were presented with fair and topical papers which I personally found to be easy to interpret and write on.

Paper one, the comprehension and composing paper, consisted of 3 articles, one of which was looking at the impact of movies on society and another that compared old with new as we were told of the differences between London of the 1930s and modern day London. I forget what the third short article was about as I didn’t answer any question on it. The essay titles were very liberal and were designed to give us almost total freedom about what we wrote although in many cases there was specified register which may very well have caught students out.

My choices of questions to answer were Text One’s section B, where I had to write out an informative election leaflet and Text Two’s section A. My choice of essay was a short story based on an image of a ballot box, I just hope that the corrector interprets the stories sudden ending as being symbolic of the abruptly ending career of a politician who doesn’t fare well in the elections! Fingers crossed!

We returned after a short lunch for Paper II of the grueling endurance test that English is! Straightaway, all 18 students flipped to the last page to see which poets had appeared. I had studied 3 - Plath, Montague and Frost but could only answer comfortably on the first two. My eyes scanned the page… Frost, Montague and Frost were all there but now I was faced with tough decision over what question to answer for this valuable 50 marker. I eventually decided on Plath and over four pages I eloquently described how her poetry is “intense, deeply personal and disturbing”. I’d be very shocked not to get at least 45/50 for it!

The other two questions on the exam - The Comparative Study and Single Text - weren’t quite as well answered. Words weren’t flowing quite as easily from me as they were for the Poetry but I do feel as if I exploited the comparative study question and threw in plenty of comparisons and feel like I justified them adequately. My single text question was on Macbeth and I’m disappointed that I could remember so few quotes. I made certain not to make the mistake of retelling the story in my answer by discussing several key moments in the relationship of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth! I spent the last 15 minutes of the exam answering the Unseen Poetry question which I absolutely hated and will be lucky to get 10/20 for it!

So after almost 6 hours of constant writing with the constant threat of cramp, I emerged from the exam hall in a relatively happy mood. I’m disappointed with my lack of Macbeth quotes and my unseen poetry answer but I’m going to be relatively optimistic for English when the results come out on August 15th!