A crying game for geography students

You could call it the crying game. First it was history and now it's geography that caused student distress. On Monday, a number of higher-level Leaving Cert geography students sat their exams through a veil of tears. Others were crying when they left their exam centres.

"I've never seen anything like it," a Waterford mother reported. "When I collected my daughter after the geography exam, a vast number of the girls came out crying. We drove past a Christian Brothers' school and I also saw three boys in tears."

"When I looked at the paper, I had to force myself not to cry," a Dublin student said. "A lot of people started crying when they got the paper and everyone was crying afterwards."

This student described the higher-level geography paper as "an absolute joke. I knew the stuff, but couldn't show it on the paper. The regional question included Iberia or Scandinavia. I had studied Spain but not Portugal. I didn't even know it was on the course. We didn't cover it in class. I spent a lot of time on geography. I need an A but I won't get it."

Another Dublin student, who got an A in geography last year and is repeating so as to increase her points for medicine, was "totally and utterly deflated" after the exam, according to her mother. "She was totally prepared for the paper, but everyone panicked yesterday."

"I have never in my life experienced this level of reaction by parents to the geography paper," commented Mr John Mulcahy, ASTI geography convenor. He was inundated by phone call from parents yesterday. "In some cases the parents are even more upset than their children and they want something done about it." Some students were so distraught, he said, that they were considering opting out of the rest of their exams fearing they had already lost the chance of a university place.

The change in the marking system in question one came in for particular criticism. Parents and teachers argued that the Department of Education and Science ought to have notified schools of changes in advance.

The Department's Leaving Cert information booklet states that schools will be notified of changes in layout and format well in advance of the exams.

A spokesman for the Department denied that the format of question one represented a major change. "Variation is a feature of any exam paper," he said. "Question one remained a compulsory question giving a total of 100 marks.

Teachers and students also complained about the unfamiliar vocabulary used in the paper, a lack of clarity in some of the questions and the fact that some of the questions were not geography questions. The wording of questions on the paper was appropriate and legitimate for higher-level students, the Department's spokesman countered.

"It's the toughest geography paper I have come across in a long time," observed Mr Billy Fitzpatrick, who is the TUI's education and research officer. `It's a mistake on the part of the examiners to deviate too far from the pattern (of exam papers) that has developed because it's impossible to cover the entire course - it's too long."

The Department's spokesman stressed that these issues would be dealt with at the forthcoming marking conference.