Terrible reporting, or me being picky?

Thoie

This is related to the postponement of the LC English paper 2, but I don't think it would be appreciated in that thread.

Paper 2 in English is perhaps the most dreaded of all Leaving Cert exams as students have to guess which of the eight poets on the syllabus will feature in the exam.

From the Irish Times.

That line has been bugging me since yesterday. Students do not have to guess anything - they can study the entire curriculum. By the same token you can say that students have to guess what topics will come up in any exam.

Am I being too picky?

Random

The idea of learning and exams is to prove you know a subject. There's one way to look at it so their comment would be wrong.

We all live in the real world though and this article appears to have been written with that in mind. There's a vast amount of bull**** in the English exams (IMO) and it is a big guessing game in every classroom in Ireland. What came up last year? What came up two years ago? Who's cousin said what about which one? In this regard the article would be accurate I reckon.

Thoie

I'm working from an old and feeble memory, but my recollection of the prescribed poetry and literature was that you studied all of it over 2 years, and then in the last month the teacher concentrated on some likely questions. I can't think of any real examples offhand, but you might have studied the role of X, Y and Z in Hamlet, discussed 4 or 5 different themes during the two years. Then, after you'd finished the curriculum, you did some past exam paper questions, and the teacher suggested that you concentrate on those two roles, and these two themes - but not to the exclusion of everything else.

jdivision

Certainly didn't happen like that in my school when I did my Leaving. We only did the irish poets and most of us guessed kinsella would come up, which he did, so he was actually the only poet I studied other than one poem by yeats

Kevster

In a general sense, I've noticed the standard of article and headlines decreasing over the past few years. The biggest drop in quality has been the Irish Independent. I even see the odd surprising article/headline in the Irish Times too. In my view, the FT is the best.