Ms Adrianne Ward:

The time extension was our main focus but there was a lot of confusion around the structure of the examination. When going into many other examinations such as my home economics examination I knew I had a section for short questions, a section for long questions and I had my time allocated beforehand, but going into my English junior certificate examination and my mock examination I had no idea how many sections there would be or how to allocate my time. As Ms O'Sullivan said in her contribution, I had to bring a calculator into my English examination and it was a strange way of multiplying the marks to work out the time, which took away even more time. Essentially, we want the extra time but we also believe the structure needs to be clarified because it leads to a very stressful situation that all students are facing nationwide going into these examinations, which has what we see as an easy fix. They manage to clarify the structure for all the other examinations so we do not understand why they cannot clarify it for English.