John Walshe: Evolution of exam into national selection process
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What have we learnt since a major ESRI report in 1996 revealed intolerable levels of stress among our Leaving Cert students, especially girls?
Not a lot, it seems. The main change is that good grades have become easier to get as teachers and students learn how to play the exam game by focusing on what will come up on the papers -- and to hell with everything else. What's suffering, apart from students' health, is their education. Teachers are increasingly teaching to the test and the broad 'holistic' education promised to students is being narrowed.
We know that physical education activities are significantly reduced in schools in the Leaving Cert year but other aspects of students' personal and social development are also put on hold.
Schools are facing a terrible dilemma -- on the one hand they are trying to prepare young people for a life beyond the Leaving yet they face huge, often unspoken demands to deliver good exam results and improve their rankings in league tables.
Teachers and, it must be said, parents put young people under enormous pressure to do well in the exam. But, as the 1996 ESRI report noted, this pressure is increasing stress levels among students and may actually reduce the ability of young people to perform to their full potential.
The 'immediate' all too often drives out what is most important and the final year in school has become a training ground for an exam that is a filter for college entry. An exam geared for young people leaving school has become a selection mechanism for higher education. It's no longer a leaving certificate but a "staying-on" certificate.
On Wednesday, students won't be asked how they got on in the Leaving -- instead they will be asked: "How many points did you get?"
Apart from anything else, that's an insult to the 11,000 -- one in five -- of this year's Leaving Cert students who did not apply to the CAO. In 1994, the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment said that the Leaving Cert exam "has come to be regarded less as a test of achievement and more as a means of discriminating between students for the purposes of selection into higher education".
It was true then and still holds today. We need to look at the assessment methods used for the Leaving Cert and also at the use of the results by higher education institutions.
Reforming the exam will have some benefits but the demand for points is having a negative backlash on what schools do and teach. It is time to look again at the points system.
- John Walshe
Irish Independent
