Leaving Cert 2007 - Biology

“Can I really do Higher Level?” I was saying to myself last night. I was looking at my pre paper - 32% - I didn’t study then so you’d think that it would be easy enough for me to do honours and pass but on the other hand, I hadn’t really done much work on Biology since the pre’s and I felt that my passing would have been reliant on me getting both easy questions and a sympathetic corrector!

I didn’t feel like riding my luck though and I decided to be happy with the 35-40 points I could get in Ordinary biology rather than risk failing honours for a small chance of me getting 40-50 points. So this morning when the supervisor was handing out the papers I requested to change down to pass.

I opened the paper and it did look fairly daunting but thankfully I had checked out a marking scheme the night before and realised that the marks were “top-heavy” meaning that the majority of marks were going for the initial answers and a minority of marks go for further points that you add (eg: 10 marks for first point, 5 for second, 3 for third and 2 for forth). This suited me down to the ground as Honours biology requires that you know the course in great detail whereas Ordinary allows you to get marks without this indepth knowledge. However, knowing one or two topics in great detail doesn’t get rewarded in Ordinary because of the distribution of the marks - you’re far better knowing a bit about everything than everything about a bit!

There were certainly questions that I choked on and had to take wild guesses at but I am quite confident of a good result as I did attempt every question with “educated” guesses. I’m not happy that I couldn’t remember anything about the Protein test though which formed a question on Section 2 although I did draw a nice diagram on Rhizopus which I had just revised before going into the exam

I left after 2 hours and was one of the last pass guys to leave, so I’m quite confident of a high C in it which mightn’t sound like much but by my logic it’s better than failing at honours level!

Tomorrow is History, a subject with a course so vast that you can only hope that something you study comes up! So as long as the GAA, De Valera in Power, theNazi state and The Role of Post War Women comes up then I’ll be in great shape. If only….