How it all began

It all began about half a year ago when Colin and myself had left the domain idle. We had various ideas but they were all put aside. So Colin came up with the idea of writing about our school experience right up until the exams. At first we were both weary of the potential this idea had so we let it settle for a while. One day I decided to put the Idea into action and got the website up and running within a few hours.

Where it brought us

As we began to blog we tried out various styles and ways of writing. We wanted some solid honesty from a student point of view, fused together with a hint of humour to keep everyone in good form. It was around March that we got into the swing of things, along with the addition of our new crew member, Amy. We were now a team. Once the site started to get some attention, a writer for the Irish Times happened to find our website. Gráinne Faller got in contact with us and we all wrote up reviews. And from there on things took off.

We began bloging like crazy and in a way became addicted to it. Writing about all our exam experiences throughout the leaving certificate year. In addition the website got 4,000 visits and 11,000 page views in the last month. The site had become a success after the endless hours of effort we put in and it finally paid off.

What we plan to do now

Now that we have gotten something back from the project, we are once again filled with ideas, inspiration and creativity. We plan to do some major expansion to the project, which will go into development over the summer. Full details of the new project will be released within the coming months. Rest assured it will be a big step forward for this growing community. What we can say is, there will be a lot of new features and things to do on the new site.

Interested?

We will be looking for Beta testers throughout the summer. We would love to know what you would like to see in the new website. If you think you would be interested in testing and getting a sneak peak of the website before everyone else does then drop us a line,

info[at]leaving-cert[dot]net

or use our contact page and email us.

Its all over! Finally. The day I have been endlessly waiting for and now Its here. I had music today but to be honest my energy to blog about the details of todays music exam have come to an end! It has been a very interesting year and an excellent experience blogging here at leaving-cert.net.

Myself and Colin will be boarding a flight at 12:30 tomorrow and heading to a festival in Germany. So from me, the very best of luck to everyone and goodbye! Who knows whats going to happen with this website. And if you were listening to the ridiculous excellent talk on SpinSouth west, don’t drink too much!

Auf wiedersehn!

I have no longer got an ounce of motivation nor care towards my final two exams. After spending the last week off relaxing myself and switching off, I find it extremely difficult to switch back into exam mode . In my opinion a week is far too long. I found it even hard to push myself to look over notes before the exam and ended up playing GTA IV for several hours.

Construction Studies is probably a more favorable subject of mine. Although I really didn’t enjoy todays paper. To begin with, it was pouring rain all day which didn’t help the mood. The exam began about 10 minutes late. Having sat there for 5 minutes waiting to be handed my exam paper and then be informed that I had to walk half way down the school to find a drawing board and T-square. Excellent preparation on behalf of the examiners and school. As soon as i was seated again I was frantically waving both arms in an effort to get the examiners attention, until I got my exam paper.

Finally I began the exam, and had a flick through the paper. Question 1, an open fireplace. We were to draw a vertical section of the wall, foundation and fireplace. The foundations and walls were literally imprinted in my memory, except for the fireplace. Having briefly skimmed over a drawing of this very question, I was annoyed I hadn’t given it more time.

The only question that stood out as a big no no for me was the U-Values question. I have had enough of maths to last me a life time, so under no circumstances was I going to attempt that question. Some questions offered students an opening to use their creativity where as others required factual information as well as common sense. However, some questions in the paper can be a little ridiculous at times. I finished by trying to sketch a picture of a heating system in a house. Which went totally wrong. Although it did look graphically appealing..

With only one exam remaining, and a flight to Germany on Friday, I look forward to a break.

Discuss the Construction Studies Exams on The Forums

Today was the first pleasing day of exams that I’ve had- In all aspects. I was leaving the house pleasantly relaxed this morning until I read the newspaper - “Operation safe - 6 day gardaí blitz”. So there I was, drinking my tea and thinking, hmm no leraner plates on the car, No NCT, no fully licensed driver in the car with me. So to top off the slight exam nerves I was now trying to focus on a strategy of actually making it to the school without getting into trouble and being anyway delayed. Best nobody quotes this!?

I thankfully arrived at the school without any hassle and sat in the car trying to look over some revision for German, which completely failed. I was confident that I was going to do well in the exam. Being the only student taking German in my school, I had the room to myself. And for the first time in my life did I feel like I was being viewed as an equal adult in the school, simply doing an exam.

The exam began and I got stuck in. Having forgot my pencil case on the way in, I had to rush to a nearby shop to get a set of pens. After about five minutes of writing the pens had failed me. Kindly enough, the examiner went and got me a pen, and so I set off. Text 1, Grand Theft Wallet. It was a pretty interesting story I have to say. The questions were fairly straight forward, although one or two were tricky from a non-German point of view. The following text was a more factual piece that required the reader to identify the facts in order to answer the questions.

The bit that caught me out was the following part to the text. Grammar, I hate it. It’s my enemy, so I took a gamble and guessed. The part b of the grammar was however a lot easier. Having said that I would have still failed trying to apply even the simplest of grammatical rules. So I went with my instincts and wrote down what sounded right to me. Hopefully that went right.

The final part was describing an image and writing a letter. I decided I would give a good 50 minutes to the letter and I ended up writing about four pages disagreeing with everything on the letter and taking into a huge rant about global warming.

Hopefully I will get to see that robot washing windows when I’m in the train station in Berlin ;-]

Discuss German in the forum? Or tech graph?

What a precise paper!?

Just did the art history exam, was fair ennough I guess. Section 1, both Newgrange and the bronze age came up which was excellent. However, the questions were very precise and there was no room for waffle. For example we were asked about strictly about the carving and then we had to compare it other examples of pre-Christian art. No doubt I lost a few marks here. For section I was misfortunate. No pre-renaissance artists came up so I couldn’t do my well learned Giotto or Jan Van Eyck. I managed to scrape a few bits from the back of my mind on Donatello under the question on an “Equestrian sculpture” as seen in the image. My sketch of this piece look more like a dog and was jumping up rather than in it’s form as seen. I couldn’t help but write “apologies” beneath it. A few extra marks for sympathy maybe!

Section 3, appreciation of art was my best section. In this section I discussed a magazine cover which accompanied the exam paper. This was for me, no problem. I am used to the concepts of graphics design from playing around with web design for so many years.

Overall I am relatively happy. I know if I had put more effort into the European section I could have had more exam success but ah well… it’s now water over the bridge. Only 1 exam left now, that being music on Thursday. I’m really looking forward to a good weekend.

Colin.

Discuss Art History in the forum? How did Biology go?

…Is the polite rudeness of the school

Ok, so its Thursday morning and the biology exam is on at 9:30, which I didn’t attend because I had given up on biology a long long long time ago. After asking numerous people what I should do, should I tell them I’m not going in.. Should I just not turn up.. etc (because I’m not one who has the nerve to ask teachers and stuff.) the overall answer I got was just not turn up. So.. I get a phone call at home at 9:40am.

“Hello.”

“Is that Amy?”

“Yes.”

“Are you not doing biology?”

“No.”

“Do you think it would have been common courtesy to tell someone?”

“Yes.”

“Goodbye.”

The ignorance fucking out stands me. Did that school have common courtesy when they started telling me how messed up I was and digging deep into my personal family life, when the reason I went to them was to ask could I drop the subject after getting numerous low grades and not having the will to work at it?