Sample Notes
Students who attend The Institute of Education are provided with exclusive, exam-focused study notes to support their home study and revision. Below are a sample of the high-quality Design & Communication Graphics (DCG) notes they receive.
Reaction to 2021 DCG Exam
Each year, our exceptional teachers give their take on the Leaving Certificate higher level exam papers. Read what Robert Kiernan, DCG teacher at The Institute of Education, had to say about the 2021 exam below.
Reaction to Leaving Certificate 2021 Design & Communication Graphics (Higher Level) by Robert Kiernan, DCG teacher at The Institute of Education.
A very fair paper with an excellent variety of topics. Fantastic choice meant that no matter what students had covered in class, there was something for everyone.
The nice thing about this paper is that students were not pigeon holed into answering Section B and Section C. There was fantastic choice and they could play to their strengths.
There was a great sense of symmetry in the questions in Sections B and C. They were easy to visualise and not very challenging to construct.
Section A
There were no changes to Section A this year and students had to answer three out of four questions.
Question A4, the intersecting solids question, could have posed problems, as students were restricted by space on the page. If they did not know the one technique to work around this restriction of space they would have been in difficulty.
However, even if they couldn’t answer this question, they still had a nice dihedral angle question, a nice conics question and a very simple perspective question.
Section B AND Section C
This year students had to answer two out of eight questions in Section B and/or C. Normally they have to answer two from Section B and two from Section C.
The major questions in Sections B and C were easy to visualise because of their symmetry.
Question B4 was a lovely question on a ping pong table. A nice pictorial view was given and the shape was easy to visualise, as it had flat surfaces with a very basic curve attached.
Students would have been delighted with the axonometric projection question in B3. There were no real visualisation skills involved, and the shapes were symmetrical and made up of basic planar surfaces and a basic curve.
The structural forms question in C2 was lovely. Usually in the question there is something added or removed. But this was just a basic hyperbolic paraboloid. Students will have been very happy with this.
