THERE is a consensus among teachers that the type of questions set and language used in examinations should cater to the abilities of the students sitting those examinations.
"Teachers representatives are concerned about readability," says Mr John Mulcahy, incoming president of the ASTI.. "They want very plain questions in which there are no problems of language difficulty or confusion. It's not just the average student who gets thrown off by the wording of a question. It can hurt everyone.
This year, the ordinary level Leaving Cert examinations in both economic history and agricultural science were the subject of complaints from teachers about the type of language used and the type of questions being asked.
If the tops were taken off the agricultural science papers and given to ordinary individuals involved in agriculture, we believe a lot of them would reverse the headings on them," Mr Martin Barrett chairman of the Irish Agricultural Science Teachers' Association, said. "No one seems to have listened to us where the pass paper is concerned. It just seems to get worse.
Mr Barrett believes that the use of phrases such as "accruing", "symbiotic relationship" and nodules of Leguminous plants" on this year's ordinary level agricultural science paper simply makes it more difficult for students to understand the questions and demonstrate what they know.
In fact, some of the questions on the agricultural science paper were not merely over complex but were examples of bad phrasing and punctuation. Even someone with a reasonable command of English would find it difficult to determine what precisely the following question means. "Outline the advantages, accruing to a soil, due to the presence of any two named soil organisms."
"Farming is still very important in this country and it should be allowed to grow," Mr Barrett says. "With these types of questions, fewer and fewer people will be doing it, and anyone can see why. It just puts students off. The results that come back from this will be bad."
Similarly, this year's economic history paper contained references to the "EEC", when EU is now the designation, and contained more unnecessarily complex question formulations. Mr Des Cowman, the ASTI's subject representative, described the paper as "carelessly put together" and accused the Department of not taking the subject seriously.
By contrast, the examiners have been complimented on the simplicity of the language used on ordinary level papers in most of the science, language and business subjects taken so far in the Leaving.
It is, in the end, a question of consistency. This includes not only consistency in the use of language but also in the grades awarded in the various subjects. As Mr Mulcahy points out, huge variations in the success rates in different subjects can acts as incentives or disincentives for students when they are choosing subjects.
"I think the teachers on the course committees are fighting hard for some level of consistency," Mr Mulcahy says. "But the course committees don't have control over the setting of papers."
Combined with the well publicised error on the higher level maths paper 2 and the unfortunate affair of this year's aural music examination (see story above), the complaints about the careless use of language on some papers raise questions about proof reading and needless obstacles being placed in the path of students, especially those at ordinary level.