Reaction to 2025 Leaving Certificate Politics & Society (Higher Level) by Paul McAndrew, Politics & Society teacher at The Institute of Education.
Launching into the short questions of Section A, students will be happy with a much more balanced array of questions than in previous years. Drawn from all over the course, the questions had a better balance of the specific and the analytic. Last year, questions tended towards a less pointed interaction with the course material, but this year’s batch was much more direct in its concern for Hobbes, Locke, the functions of the President etc. The prepared students will have been happy but perhaps a sense of concern might creep in as material appeared that they might have hoped would be reserved for later in the paper.
The Data-Based Questions started with a nice selection of tasks that would be familiar to any student. However, part (g) will trip many students up as they needed to balance numerous aspects in a very particular and concise format. To adequately address this task students needed to account for information from the two texts, the practical aspects of citizen participation in democracy and the philosophical idea of the social contract. When combined with a quote from Reinhold Niebuhr, students had five components to synthesise into a very short space. For those who had drilled this type of task it would be manageable, but it required a more refined sensibility than other tasks.
The final phase of the paper is the Discursive Essays, worth 50% of the paper (40% of their total grade). While students should anticipate challenge in any exam, this section was more difficult than previous years. Firstly, students only had 6 questions to choose from rather than the 7 of previous years, thus narrowing their opportunities to show their interests/strengths. But the main challenge of this section is the difference between the surface appeal of the question and the deeper need to write in a manner substantive enough to earn the full spectrum of marks. For example, Question 3(b) on the right to protest would be a topic on which many politically minded students would have opinions, but this area is not a large part of the curriculum and thus there is little assigned material that could be used as evidence to make the discussion more robust. Something similar happens on Question 6 which starts with a Mandela quote on education’s capacity to change the world, yet the question is not on education itself but on Paulo Freire’s theory of education. A students could easily begin this essay but would struggle to balance both momentum and evidence effectively over the course of a 4-page essay. Even when a question has a clear correspondence to the syllabus, such as Question 4 on sustainable development, the seeming openness of the question belies a series of potholes and burdens that make them precarious to approach. Ultimately, many students will move towards Q5 on misinformation and Q7 on Nationalism as both sit most squarely within the remit of the course material and offer the fewest potential stumbling blocks.
After such a promising start, students will likely feel that the final 50% of the exam will be a struggle to really distinguish themselves as they precariously balance topics and evidence.