I have an ever-growing mountain of mock papers to be corrected, so instead of even looking at them, I spent the morning perusing the recently-published deferred physics paper from last summer. This was sat by a small number of students at the end of June, who were ill or otherwise unable to sit the earlier paper.

It is available here: State Examination Commission - Exam Material Archive (examinations.ie)

(make sure to click on 'deferred exam papers', rather than 'exam papers')

It is generally in keeping with the style of exam we have become used to over the years, but I thought there were a few notable points:

In section A, question 2 (shown here) was about finding the specific heat capacity of water - something which hasn't featured recently. But the question required students to draw a graph and to find the shc from the slope of the graph - and I think many students would have found that a stretch.

Fair enough: there is choice after all, and students only have to answer 3 of the 5 section A questions. But there were two questions on electricity - so any student inclined to skip the electricity will have been badly burned here!

In section B, I noticed that students were asked about. Archimedes Principle (and how to demonstrate it), the Wheatstone Bridge, Spectrometers, and Capacitance - which I found notable because these are all topics not specifically mentioned on the draft specs for L Cert 2027. Perhaps they're being given a last run out while they still have the chance.

A few other things...

Q4 in section A was about resistance vs Temp, but it also had a novel twist where students had to identify the metal involved by consulting a list of resistivities of known metals. It struck me as the sort of question that we'll be seeing a lot of post 2027?

Finally, I loved that Schrodinger got a mention in q 13 - more than a mention really - in a way that reminded me of an understanding of the wave equation I have long forgotten (if I ever had it!)