Today more than 6,500 students in schools across Galway will take their seats for the second day of the Leaving and Junior Certificate examinations.
Nationally some 116,334 candidates at a total of 4,700 exam centres are this year expected to sit the Leaving Cert, Leaving Cert Applied, and Junior Cert examinations which began yesterday. Last year the total number of exam candidates nationally was 115,165.
According to figures obtained from the State Examinations Commission (SEC ) the predicted number of Leaving Cert students to sit the exams throughout County Galway in 2010 is 3,235. The predicted number to sit the Leaving Cert Applied is 138 while 3,171 are predicted to sit the Junior Cert exams.
Yesterday the Leaving Cert students completed English Paper 1 in the morning while the afternoon session was reserved for Home Economics, Scientific and Social. English paper 2 and engineering will take place today while Geography and the first paper for Mathematics will be tomorrow. Over the next two weeks the students will face several more exams in subjects such as Irish, History, Biology, Art, Accounting, Agricultural Science, and an array of foreign languages, with a finishing date scheduled for June 25. The 138 Leaving Cert Applied students in Galway tackled exams in English and Communication and Social Education yesterday. From today until June 17 they will face further exams in subjects such as Irish, Sign Language, Engineering, Agriculture/Horticulture, Technology, and Active Leisure Studies.
The timetable is just as gruelling for the 3,171 Junior Cert students in Galway who completed both English papers yesterday. Both Irish papers will be undertaken today and tomorrow they will face Geography, Maths paper 1, and Environmental Social Studies. A total of 26 separate exams will take place over the next two weeks, finishing on June 24.
The SEC has tightened up security arrangements to avoid a repeat of last year’s debacle when more than 50,000 Leaving Cert students nationally were forced to resit an English exam after a superintendent in Drogheda handed out a paper 24 hours prematurely. The mistake resulted in an overall cost of about €1.7 million to reschedule the exam to a Saturday.
Referring to the mishap, chairman of the SEC Richard Langford said: “The events surrounding the reschedule of Leaving Certificate English Paper 2 last year show how disruption to the examination schedule can impact on all those involved... As an organisation we have looked carefully at what happened last year and we have put in place a series of measures so that the 2010 examinations will proceed as scheduled.”
The new security procedures include a redesign of exam paper packets to provide clearer information and a rescheduling of two-paper subjects into morning and afternoon exams, with different colour-coded papers. There will also be put in place a new witness system which requires one supervisor to verify that another has collected the correct packet and has been given correct instructions. Another significant change this year is that for the very first time the papers will be distributed to the students “face-up” so that students can see immediately whether they have received the correct one.
