Mr. Aidan Farrell:

I do not have the information to hand on the average cost of producing an examination paper, but I will get the information to the committee in a matter of days.

In terms of whether the State Examinations Commission has ever considered producing mock papers, to be honest, we have not. Let me explain the reason. There is probably a mixed practice in schools in that quite a number of schools provide mock examinations, but not all the mock examination papers would come from commercial suppliers. In many cases, teachers will set their own mock questions in a mock examination paper. I suspect one of the reasons is that mock examinations are taken in spring each year. The leaving certificate, or for that matter the junior certificate cycle, are a two or three-year programme, respectively. Teachers have not finished teaching those programmes. A mock paper could be put in front of candidates covering a range of areas which the students would not have yet covered in the classroom. Any value the mock examinations would have is very much diminished at that point because the students have not covered the material. They are learning very little from that experience. Another area where we would have to be very careful is the significance of the examinations in an Irish context. Naturally students want to prepare as well as they can for the examination. It is only human nature for people to try to predict what they think will come up. If a question on the poet Sylvia Plath came up last year, it will not come up this year, or whatever the case might be. That is human nature and that is fully understandable. If it were the case that the SEC were either to produce mock papers or to provide oversight or endorsement of the mock examination papers provided by one or a number of the commercial suppliers, we would then be entering into the area of commenting or people believing they know what may come up in the live examination. Clearly, if we were to design a mock paper and ask a question framed in a particular way, are we going to ask that question again in the June examination? Even in terms of proper preparation from an education or assessment point of view, there would be real negative implications for teaching and learning if we were to engage in that sort of activity.