Leaving Cert Student To Undo 14 Years Of Education With Epic Session

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LIKE many of his fellow Leaving Certificate students, Mayo teenager Alan Clerkin is planning to celebrate the official end of the exam season with an unmerciful bender that will erase most (if not all) of what he learned over his 14 years at school.

Clerkin, who finished up his exams with the Physics and Chemistry papers, is said to be looking forward to tonight’s session with the rest of his mates, as the Leaving Cert comes to a close for another year following examinations for subjects nobody takes.

The group of friends plan to begin drinking at around four, at which point years of mathematical formulas and Irish grammatical rules will begin to be deleted from their brain cells.

“I’d say by the time we get into Westport tonight, I’ll have forgotten what play it was we did for English,” said Clerkin, who has cousins in Australia with a job waiting for him. “By morning, I’ll be lucky to know how to do long division. I’d like to be able to hang onto the aul French in case I go there on holidays at some point, but I’m promising nothing”.

Clerkin is just one of thousands of Irish students who will release the boiler-room pressure of condensing years of education into a fortnight of government approved grilling. Like a lot of his peers, he has spent the last two months scouring past exam papers in an attempt to best-guess the questions he would be asked, and cramming the relevant knowledge.

“The aul study takes a lot out of you”, said the 17-year-old as he washed himself with a can of Lynx.

“There was a lot of talk about ditching the Leaving Cert in favour of continuous assessment, where we would have been graded over our total performance at school over the years as opposed to how much we can memorise for a fortnight. But sure if they did that, when would we have a session and blow off the unbearable pressure put on us by the Leaving Cert? Sure, it makes no sense at all!”

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