Agricultural Science Exam Update

This piece first appeared on The Frog Blog. It was my second post reacting to this year's Leaving Certificate Agricultural Science Exam.

I wrote an email this morning to the Chief Examiner for Agricultural Science for the State Examinations Commission, (not pictured - that's a cow) highlighting my concerns about yesterday's Leaving Certificate Agricultural Science exam paper. I stressed that the exam simply did not reflect what was on the syllabus and I urged him to reform the paper and his drafting team. I understand that he is not from an agricultural background and has little experience in the subject, thus must trust his drafters to produce a paper that will accurately assess the syllabus and the pupil learning. I urged him to form a new drafting team that will accurately reflect the syllabus (outdated as it is) in future exams.

Exam Reaction - Agricultural Science

This post first appeared on my other site, The Frog Blog, a few days ago. I had been reacting to all the Leaving Certificate Science exams, me being a science teacher, but this particular exam got under my skin. I have been teaching Agricultural Science for nine years now and I am sick of the exam "shifting the goalposts" every year.

Let me warn you! This gets nasty! I am so frustrated and annoyed, both for pupils of Agricultural Science and my fellow teachers. Every year the exam seems to expand our already ancient and outdated syllabus and this year is no exception. This year's higher level paaper is a travesty - an utterly unfair assessment of the typical Agricultural Science pupil's learning over the past two years. How this exam is supposed to reflect the syllabus is unknown to me, and many of my fellow teachers that I have spoken to in the last hour. There are questions on this paper I can't answer - and I am a good teacher. I know for a fact that the majority of Agricultural Science teachers in this country couldn't answer all the parts of this questions - they couldn't even find information on them, as the syllabus (or any of the textbooks) doesn't mention them (Click here to see the syllabus by the way). Let me go through the paper first and outline how the syllabus and the exam simply don't match.