Education

Leaving Cert biology: Extra choice allows students navigate challenging questions

‘Whole topics could be avoided and yet students could still achieve a high grade,’ says one teacher

Leaving Cert students sat the biology exam on Tuesday afternoon. File photograph: Eric Luke

Peter McGuire
Tue Jun 14 2022 - 17:51

A human-focused biology paper was fair and offered plenty of choice, although there were a few challenging points, teachers have said.

“Any student with a good knowledge of ecology, photosynthesis and human biology had a large amount of choice,” said Wesley Hammond, a biology teacher at the Institute of Education.

“The language used was very clear and this made it easier for students who find the interpretation of certain questions difficult.

“Due to certain chapters dominating large parts of the paper, whole topics could be avoided and yet students could still achieve a high grade, which was the purpose of the changes made to the paper in light of Covid.”

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Gemma Gillespie, a teacher at Grange Post Primary School, Co Sligo, agreed that the paper offered choice.

“The 2022 modifications offered students many pathways to navigate the paper without having to study all topics,” said Ms Gillespie, a Studyclix subject expert.

“Students were required to answer eight out of seventeen questions which provided a vast choice. Strategic students would have observed that revising the shorter unit one and unit two topics could allow them more than enough questions to answer an entire paper, eliminating the much longer unit three.”

Mr Hammond said some students will have been delighted that the plant chapters from unit three could be avoided easily this year.

The first of the short questions was on food, and while it was “lovely”, it may have caught out a few students, as it was based solely on proteins, he said.

“Respiration, surprisingly, didn’t come up in the long questions this year [but] if students knew the carbon number of certain molecules then this was a very doable question,” he said.

Ms Gillespie said students were disappointed with the second extra question as the predicted evolution topic.

“It was strongly mixed in unit three topics — human reproduction, plant reproduction and the circulatory system — but again this would reward students who did the extra work,” she said.

“More difficult topics such as genetics and protein synthesis were asked in a very straightforward manner with questions broken up into small bite size parts, though students may have struggled to draw a nucleotide.”

Mr Hammond said he was largely happy with the experiment questions.

“If students were confident with the new layout of the experiments in Section B this year, this section would definitely have been the easiest of all three,” he said.

“In the long questions, part two of a question based only on bacteria may have created some difficulty as students sometimes find it hard to differentiate between asepsis and sterility.

“As expected, there was one full length question on ecology in question 12. Some students find the style of question 12B difficult, but this year the paragraph presented was very easy to understand,” he said.

Ms Gillespie said the ordinary level paper was straightforward for the most part.

“But some students may have found the genetics question challenging as quite a lot of detail was required in the answer,” she said.

Try this one at home:

Leaving Cert biology, higher level

Excretion is an important process in homeostasis in living organisms. (i) Explain the underlined terms. (ii) (b) Name one excretory organ in plants.

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