Long wait is over for 6,300 Galway Leaving and Junior Certs

The wait is over for more than 6,000 students across Galway city and county as two and a half weeks of the Leaving Cert and Junior Cert finally got underway yesterday.

And for most it seemed to be a good start with the reaction to their first test – English Paper I – helping to ease those early nerves for all 6,357 of them.

Mary Nihill, Principal of Calasanctius College in Oranmore, said the Leaving Cert students there were reasonably satisfied with the paper.

“The students were very happy; they had plenty of choices and it’s a good paper to start on. We also had two full classes sitting the Home Economics exam in the afternoon. But there was definitely a good atmosphere after the first exam,” she said.

She also admitted that her students were ‘a bit nervous this morning, particularly the Leaving Cert students’.

“But we have a lot of support structures in place, tutors and teachers were in the school to help with the nerves,” she added.

She went on to say that the Junior Cert students were equally pleased to have the first exam out of the way. “They were very happy with the paper generally,” she said.

In the City, Ciaran Doyle, Principal of St. Joseph’s Patrician College (the Bish) said that the Leaving Cert students were ‘very relaxed before the exam this morning’.

“The general feeling after the first exam was quite positive, everybody was very happy with the paper, by all accounts it was a very fair paper. The first paper is comprehension and essays so it was quite manageable and doable,” he said.

The examinations are set to last just over two weeks, with the Leaving Certificate running until June 19 and the Junior Certificate finishing the day before.

The Leaving Certificate itself will see 3,068 students in Galway pitting their wits against the State Examination Commission; 1,490 of those will be male, while the remaining 1,578 are female candidates.

See full story in this week’s Connacht Tribune.