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New to the whole exam things this year with daughter doing mocks soon for intercert. However, some teachers are not correcting papers but asking for €5 per exam (2 in Irish etc.) to get papers corrected by someone else? Not sure how reasonable this is…most teachers correct papers themselves. Anyone else come across this practice. Bit annoyed at it….with all the subjects and 2 papers in English, Irish etc. it adds up. Doesnt seem fair on the teachers who do correct papers eithers.
Hi Mummy5,
My brother did his leaving cert last yr and had to pay to get his mocks corrected. I think my Mam paid €10 per paper. I dont understand why the teachers in the school just dont exchange papers among themselves.
Mam also had to pay for his mock junior cert exams to be corrected.
I’m a secondary teacher, & this is my understanding of the situation.
Practice varies from school to school & teacher to teacher.
In some places, pupils / parents felt that teachers were marking the exams too severely in an attempt to make pupils study harder. (Teachers would generally deny this, but who knows…)
This is the same reason why papers are generally not swapped between teachers – because some pupils /parents felt that personal relationships between teachers & pupils might be playing a role in the grading (remember teachers often teach a variety of subjects ie your Maths teacher could end up correcting your English paper). The other reason is that there is often only one teacher teaching a particular subject ie German or Honours Irish. And then you’ll have the odd case where one teacher has a class of 32 & another of 16….. It’s not as straightforward as you might think.
In order to make the results more acceptable, the exams were then given to outsiders to correct & obviously thay had to be paid. Schools had no funds, therefore …. back to the parents. In some places it then became policy for all trial papers to be outsourced.
That’s the background.
It is without doubt another burden on parents, but just to be clear, it is not in any way money going to the school itself or the teachers in the schools. If it is a policy that parents object to, the best route is to contact principal, or the Board of Management. There is one – or is it two? – parents reps on it. The principal can give you their contact details.
Hope this some clarification.
okay..wont be popular for this comment but what happened before this sending them out practice. Were teachers paid extra for correcting or was it part of their job description. Do teachers just not want to do it? Thats what I feel as a parent. Its the mocks….not the real thing. Surely teachers cant mark that way off???
It should be part of the teacher job.
Maybe you can approach the teacher and say you can’t /won’t pay, still you would like to have all the papers corrected, and you accept the fact that because of the relation teacher / pupil it can be slightly less accurate / fair. It’s to have a general idea of the result as you say it’s not the final exam.And it’s not fair, that parents with money can have the papers corrected and the ones without will do the mocks and can’t have a clue were to stand in term of results.
Really not fair.Fabienne
we have to pay €6 per paper, €12 for Maths English etc as two papers..i think we paid out €78 for the mock junior cert!! a little over the top i think…
Well ladies, I am shocked at this post! Parents having to pay to get the mocks results… No offence to the teacher who nicely explained the problem. But when I did the mocks (or the equivalents, in France), papers were anonymous. Which means that teachers wouldn’t know which pupil they were correcting. And yes this is part of the teachers jobs. My 2 parents were teachers, and spent a good part of their evenings and holidays preparing lessons AND correcting papers.
My kids are still young so I didn’t know the situation in Secondary school but I hope by then this will be resolved and dealt with properly.
Parents whose kids are in these situation should not accept this and should submit the idea of putting an anonymous system into place(?).
Good luck to all anywayGod thats mad when I was in school the mocks were corrected by the teacher. And we didnt have to pay for them either!
glad its not just me that thinks this is mad. I thought it was part of the job too?Well it always was.
Its not even like the school tells you its x amount for the exams. Each teacher is doing it individually so some are being corrected by teachers, some not. I just dont get the way it works. They have to bring the money in to each individual teacher???
I think parents should get together and refuse to pay.
And the papers should be corrected.As well I think it takes foreever to get the results of the leaving cert.
Education should be free, it’s kind of not so bad, but what happens to families who can’t pay 10 euro per paper? Do they not have to right to succed in their education even if they don’t have much money to start of?
The mock are here to prepare you and show you weak points so you can work on it.
Otherwise what’s the point of the mock if you don’t know the results.Wish the best to your daughter. Hope she does well.
Fabienne
Forgot to say, if your daughter, or anyone here does french, I’ll look at it for free and correct it, free of charge.
BUT, I’m not teaching in secondary school, only primary, but been french I can correct it, even if I don’t know exactly how the give or take away points.
I can mark what is wrong, what’s good (from what I’ve seen in exam papers), but can’t give you a final note.Fabienne
This is just another in a long line of shocking fees we will have to deal with in schools….we have to start saying no more, its getting out of hand.
In recent weeks we had to pay for a skipping class, homework club, religion classes and skipping ropes. The ropes were optional and we actually said no to our two but the usual thing happened where everyone else was getting them and our kids pleaded with us and cried, so we eventually caved in and got them. (Probably not the best example but we did stick to our guns and say no for a few days but they were so upset about not getting them that we gave in. In hindsight maybe they should not have been on sale at the school? maybe we should be able to go to our local tesco and pick them up for a quarter of the price? but the skipping people said these were special ropes and of course, our kids wanted those ones in particular? rock, hard place anyone?)
I applaud the school for getting the kids active with skipping (although should it really 2.50 per child for a skipping lesson? How much profit are those guys making at 2.50 per child for one lesson for the whole school??) but its hard on parents with unexpected costs all the time.
It just seems like they are asking for money every other week. It is mental.
Just quickly scanned posts, so apologies if I’ve misread / misunderstood anything.
Mocks are NOT part of the school curriculum or of teacher’s jobs – as I understand it. They are not even done in some schools at all. They are done voluntarily by a school if it believes that they are of benefit to most pupils.
They are a relatively recent arrival in the school system & are not – as I understand it – even mentioned in any job description.
The other thing to understand is that teachers did a lot of extra curricular work for years (sport, drama, yard supervision, etc) & during the last industrial dispute with the gov, the gov tried to say that anything teachers did regularly would automatically become part of the job description – even if they were doing it in their free time & voluntarily.The result is that many teachers won’t do anything that is not specified any more.
I believe that the mocks came about as a response to parents feelings that a trial run at the exams would be beneficial to the pupils & schools trying to accommodate this. As I understand it!
In some schools, some teachers correct them themselves, some don’t. The sitauation varies wildly.
I’ve never come across a situation where a child’s exams are not corrected coz the parents can’t pay. It simply wouldn’t happen in our school.
The prices are set by marking companies not the schools – but please bear in mind that, for example, an Honours English Leaving Cert paper allows a pupil to write for approx three and a half hours. That’s 20+ pages. Now, how long do you think it takes to correct that? An hour? And what is the minimum wage? I’m not defending the practice one way or the other, just trying to bring some additional info to the debate. Indeed, mostly the teachers who correct them are, I feel, being taken advantage of, as they tend to be young & unemployed.
As far as being anonymous goes, again in theory, & in large scale national exams that is fine, but in most cases in smaller Irish schools, it simply wouldn’t work. If I have a class of 32 English pupils, I would alomost certainly recognise the handwriting at 100 paces, name or no name.
Again, I’m not wildly in favour of the present system, but feel it is important for all debates on issues like this to be as well informed as possible. 🙂 Don’t shoot me!
Hmmmm……see what you’re saying pookie but have to disagree on some parts. Mocks are not a recent phenomenon, I did mock exams for my intercert and leaving cert and that was 17 years ago, so they have been going a long time and there was no question of paying for them back then.
I have a sister who is 17 and did her leaving cert last year and there was no charge to correct her mock exams either, so this is a new development in some schools; which is why it is surprising to so many parents.
Its just that in the current economic climate, its hard to impose another cost on already stretched parents. Regardless of why this has come about at the end of the day its the parents who are paying for it.
May not be the schools fault but, ultimately, the parents are the ones paying the price for the situation we are in. So its reasonable for parents to question this and be upset about it, it is expensive enough to pay for a child to sit the leaving cert and have those papers corrected without charging for the mocks too.
Parents just have not got the money anymore for unexpected fees like this and its easy to say that the school would never decide to not correcta paper due to money issues but lets be honest, if you don’t pay for something in a school situation and if word gets around and its not nice. School committees and playgrounds are gossip feeding grounds and no one wants to be known as someone who does not or cannot pay their way.
If it was my kids school, I would go to the school committee about this and ask if there is a way around it, in the current climate, there are surely a lot of parents who cannot pay such fees so an alternative solution must be found.
Perhaps schools situated close to each other could swap papers, that way the papers would be marked fairly as teachers would not know whose papers they were marking. And as the schools would be doing each other a favour, no money would need to be charged?
Just a thought….
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