PROPOSALS TO change how the Junior Cert is assessed – billed as a “radical departure” for Irish education – are set to be backed by Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn.
Under the plan, the written Junior Cert exam in June will account for only 60 per cent of the marks. The remaining 40 per cent will be allocated to portfolio work over the entire three years of the Junior Cert cycle.
In the most controversial proposed change, this portfolio work will be assessed in the student’s own school, although samples of the corrected projects will be checked by the State Exams Commission.
The written exams will also change radically. With the exception of Irish, English and maths, all subjects will be examined at a common level. Exams will be shorter (90 to 180 minutes) and students will take a maximum of eight subjects. At present, it is not unusual for students to take 12 subjects or more.
Mr Quinn is set to back the proposals, tabled by his advisory group, the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment.
The council – comprising teachers’ union representatives and other education partners – has unanimously backed the proposals. It says the current exam falls short of what students require; a significant number do not develop the skills they need while many, boys in particular, disengage from the classroom.
Mr Quinn hopes to roll out the new exam from September 2014 with the first revised Junior Cert likely to be examined in 2017.
Reform of the Junior Cert is Mr Quinn’s main policy priority after the ranking of 15-year-old students in Ireland slumped in the last report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
The Association of Secondary Teachers in Ireland, the main second-level teachers’ union, is wary of any system in which teachers assess their own pupils.
However, the department hopes teachers’ unions will back a system whereby the portfolio work from one class is assessed by a teacher who does not take this class in the school.
The department is also hoping to introduce online assessment in the roll-out of the new exam.
The curriculum council says school-based assessment, while a radical departure for Irish education, is already accepted as best practice in other education systems such as Australia and Scotland. Making the case for radical change, it says the new Junior Cert must be more than a “Leaving Cert light”.
The teachers’ unions are also certain to raise questions about the capacity of schools to roll out the new course. In its proposals, the council acknowledges schools will need new “administrative and technological capacity” to gather information on portfolios for the State Exams Commission.
The council says the new junior cycle will “come to be more about the learning” than the exam and students will have a “more positive engagement” with learning.
The Junior Cert was heralded as a modern, user-friendly exam when it replaced the Inter Cert more than 20 years ago. But it became a mirror image of the Leaving Cert, with the same emphasis on rote learning and exams.
Mr Quinn sees Junior Cert reform as the first step in a process that will also overhaul the Leaving Cert and the CAO system.
