Junior Cert: Civic Social and Political Education: Junior Certificate students facing into yesterday's common civic social and political education (CSPE) paper could do so safe in the knowledge that not everything depended on their performance on the day itself.
This is because only 40 per cent of the total marks awarded for the course relate to yesterday's written paper, which was warmly welcomed by teachers as a big improvement on last year's exam.
The remaining marks are allocated for students' own project work submitted before the end of the academic year.
The CSPE course is widely regarded as among the most topical of all the subjects offered in the State exams.
This year's paper served to underline this fact, with students asked to answer questions on issues such as the 60th anniversary of the death of Anne Frank, fair trade, student councils and child labour.
In common with previous years, they were also presented with full-colour pictures of some well-known politicians, including Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and Tánaiste Mary Harney.
They were then provided with their titles, and asked to write down next to each picture what position the individual in question holds.
The CSPE exam is compulsory for all Junior Certificate students and has been applauded in some quarters as an effort to raise teenagers' awareness of their role as citizens.
However, last year the layout of the exam was strongly criticised by teachers and students, because little time and effort seemed to have been put into the presentation of the imagery on the paper.
But in a clear effort to address this criticism, this year's paper included a high-quality colour insert accompanying the main paper.
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/sandbox.irishtimes/ZNXTZ2DRXNFU5MTNZFDVCVJJNE.png)