Reaction to 2025 Leaving Certificate Business (Higher Level) by Keith Hannigan, Business teacher at The Institute of Education.
- Students who really know their past papers will be delighted.
- An emphasis on definitions and the fundamentals of the subject will make this accessible to every level.
Students will have been thrilled with Section 1’s short questions. The mixture of rapid response questions and familiar material recycled from past papers meant that everyone could give every question a solid attempt. The inclusions of Capital Gains Tax and Inflation were a little more topical than the other questions but also rooted in the staples of the course. Many students will have flown through this section, saving time but also maybe getting anxious that there might be bombs of questions ahead to throw them of course.
The Applied Business Question (ABQ) can be a cause of stress for students: there is no choice in questions and previous years have included some tricky takes on the material – so this is where some will have anticipated an upset. Thankfully, upon opening the second booklet they were greeted with an array of standard questions that anyone who spent time working over the past papers will recognize. The skills/characteristics of the entrepreneur turned up for a second year, so hopefully students didn’t overlook this when trying to trim down their revision, but the question was accessible that they easily could have spotted a dozen examples in the text. A question on Types of Control was ideal as this is a very popular topic for both question setters and students. Many teachers will have predicted the appearance of “functions of human resource management (HRM)” so the final question was a lovely way to close this section. Many students will have found that they had an abundance of material to include, and so with the time saved in Section 1, they could have listed more elements to try and secure the grade.
Section 3 tested students’ grasp of the fundamentals, but with two questions based on the three chapters of Unit 1 it was nicely approachable. Question 1 focused on material that would have been mainstays of class tests since 5th Year: elements of a contract, industrial action, discrimination. These were then mirrored in Question 4 (a bonus question added due to the Covid adjustments) with the mention of breach of contract and fair dismissal. Not everything here was straight forward as Question 5 required students to have a good grasp of McGregor’s Theory X, which can be awkward to know how to effectively address in the exam context. However, while this topic is tougher and can cause challenges, this is helped by the previous appearance on the paper two years ago. Students armed with not only the past papers but insight into the marking scheme from that year will know how to make the most of this.
As students close this paper, they should find themselves satisfied that everything was fair and attemptable – the anticipated bombs never appeared.