RESITTING THE LEAVING:It's not FRANK McNALLY'Sfault that his Leaving Cert history paper is less than perfect – it's Margaret Thatcher's
THE ONE piece of advice I remember from my original Leaving Cert was that you should always read the exam paper carefully. So I do: and this is my first mistake.
It reveals that 20 per cent of the marks for honours history are allocated to a “pre-submitted research study report”. My cruel Summer Living Editor had somehow failed to mention this during the breezy conversation in which he assured me that re-sitting an exam I last did when Jimmy Carter was US president would not involve the risk of humiliation.
For a moment, I consider a desperate plan involving the compilation of a "post-submitted research study report". One option might be to nip back to The Irish Timesnewsroom and interview the oldest colleague I can find about changes in the ethics of claiming unreceipted expenses in late-20th-century Irish journalism. But my allotted two hours and 50 minutes is ticking fast, so I abandon the idea. Confidence already shattered, I plough on and read the questions.
The other shock of the modern Leaving Cert history paper – not exactly pleasant either, but more sympathetic to the prospects of success – is how much of the syllabus I have now lived through. Once upon a time, history was about long-dead people, such as Isaac Butt and Prince von Metternich. And sure enough, Butt and Metternich are still there in 2009: their conditions unimproved by the intervening years.
But large swathes of material that I remember as current affairs have slipped quietly from the news pages and into the history books while I wasn’t looking. The Northern Troubles, for example. Margaret Thatcher. Jacques Delors. All suddenly sepia-tinted and staring back at me in the form of exam questions.
I sense Thatcher’s broader influence on the history paper. She always talked about giving the consumer “choice”. And by my calculation, apart from one compulsory question, the consumer of the 2009 Leaving Cert history exam is required to pick any three subjects from a bewildering list of 44. Just reading all the options saps my energy.
That said, an alarmingly high number of these automatically disqualify themselves on the grounds that the only detail I could now marshal to support them would fit on the back of a stamp. No ifs, Butts, or Metternichs: the whole 19th century is a bit of a blur. I could probably treat a few of the topics with broad brush strokes. But the history of French Impressionism is probably the only subject where the examiner would agree to stand well back from my answer and scrunch his eyes up; and incredibly this is not one of the 44 options.
Thus, frustrated at how little meaningful choice there is – damn you, Margaret Thatcher – I tick three of an estimated six questions that could be attempted with any confidence. Then I start writing.
Next to not having attended school for 30 years, the other problem facing a middle-aged Leaving Cert student is a technical one. Like most of my generation, I learned joined-up writing in the era of ink-wells and blotters. At best, I was no calligrapher. Now, thanks to my subsequent mastery of such journalistic techniques as two-fingered typing, it has been decades since I used legible long-hand for anything bigger than a Christmas card.
It should be something you never forget, like riding a bike. But not wishing to take any more chances, other than the risk of hand-cramp, I make another quick decision: to do my entire paper in block capitals.
The compulsory question – on Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Bus Boycott – is almost too easy. The student only has to read two texts and compare them. It’s so simple I suspect a booby-trap. But circling the question several times and prodding it here and there does not set anything off. So I complete the answers and proceed to my first chosen subject: “Why were the [1921] Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations controversial?” Forty minutes later, with both my penmanship and Éamon de Valera hung out to dry, I find myself warming to the whole Leaving Cert thing again.
The years fall away and, emotionally involved now, I plunge into my second chosen question – on the social and economic effects of the modern Troubles – with something bordering on enthusiasm. Then the effort drains me, and by the Good Friday Agreement, I badly need some form of stimulant to keep going.
As luck would have it, there is a canteen next door. Strictly speaking, a real Leaving Cert student would not be allowed to nip out mid-exam for a takeaway coffee. But strictly speaking, his teachers would have warned him about the pre-submitted research project. So taking advantage of lax security, I complete my last question – on Thatcher and Europe – over a strong Americano.
Like a bedraggled marathon runner, my right hand has already hit the wall. Now it’s operating on instinct, and I just hope the examiner can still read the stuff: except, of course, the bits where I use indecipherable writing as a strategy.
Suddenly, my time is up. On the other hand, the Editor has not arrived yet to collect the paper, and I realise that only a sense of honour prevents me from taking advantage of the extra few minutes. So I do just that, ruthlessly: going back over my answers and inserting footnotes.
Finally, the Editor arrives and I hand up my paper. Then, a little ruefully, I head back to the newsroom, remembering what Harry Truman once said: “There is nothing new in the world except the history you don’t know.”
How Frank did
THE MARKER SAYS
Overall, a fair script. With more effort and development, it has the potential to achieve a high C/low B grade.The opening Documents question (the candidate achieved 70 per cent) was handled well in sections one, two and three. However, the contextualisation question was far too short and warranted a mini-essay-sized answer, looking at the boycott’s legacy in some detail.
FRANK’S RESULT
251/400 – 63%
C2
This is the mark the student got in the exam without taking into account the project, which would not happen in the real exam. The grade after including the average marks awarded for the Project (88) would be 339/500, which is 68 per cent – C1.
Each marker was approached independently by The Irish Times, and the results have not been endorsed by the State Examinations Commission
