Four kinds of student are paying the price for unfair Leaving Cert grade inflation

This afternoon, tens of thousands of young people will be issued with course offers by our thirdlevel institutions. We wish them all well, today and for the future, even as the recent tragedy in Clonmel illustrates how random events contribute to the precarity of life, and puts the Leaving Cert into perspective.

Today, in the midst of great joy for many, there will be disappointment for some. Not everyone will be offered a place on the course or in the place where they wanted to study.

Round two or even round three offers may change that in some cases, but many will be still left out and may seek alternative options such as traineeships or apprenticeships, rightly championed by Minister for Further and Higher Education Simon Harris. Or they may choose to repeat the year. Either way, their paths will potentially be very different than they envisaged.

Some, however, will lose out for reasons that are rightly seen as unfair, because of the continued inflation of Leaving Certificate grades.

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All of the universities and other third-level institutions in this country pull out the stops to support students in ways that extend far beyond the classroom

Covid has been tough for all, and hindsight can be a great thing. It was blindingly obvious in the summer of 2020 that artificially inflating Leaving Cert grades for that year’s cohort would throw students with previous years’ results off the edge of a cliff. Yet inflated grades were issued. The unfairness of that year has stuck, for four years now. It is understandable that Minister Norma Foley would not wish to make this year’s students pay the price.

But the ongoing perpetuation of inflated grades is no solution either. It creates injustices for four categories of young people. It also speaks to a lack of co-ordinated Government thinking on a range of issues.

Those four categories may be relatively small when set beside overall Leaving Certificate numbers, but together they represent something more profound.

The first category are high achieving students who lose out because of random selection for top courses. It leaves an incredibly bitter taste in the mouths of those who get enough points, but don’t get the course. That is compounded by the knowledge that some of those who were successful may have benefitted from grade inflation. It speaks to a basic unfairness that results from inflated grades.

The second category includes those at the other end of the scale, whose expectations rise on the back of their inflated results.

All of the universities and other third-level institutions in this country pull out the stops to support students in ways that extend far beyond the classroom. Universities’ professional support staff are a credit to us in this regard, and our academics certainly do not spend their time merely lecturing and marking. Despite that, university proves to be a step too far for some students.

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Often, having achieved middling results in a Leaving Cert that puts a premium on rote learning, they struggle to engage critically and reflectively with new concepts, whether in engineering, literature or anywhere in between. In response to Covid and inflated grades, universities were asked to create extra places, and did so.

Yet those extra places have not been created by Government as a consequence of any structured planning or reflection on what society as a whole needs. A serious discussion about the over-arching strategic role of third-level education and the rates of participation in it is long overdue in the interests of the country, and of the students themselves.

The third category includes those in Ireland who take exams other than the Leaving Certificate. That includes a small number of students in schools in this country who study for the International Baccalaureate (IB), and whose grades have not been inflated. It also includes A Level students, most of whom are in the North but some of whom live in this state and cross the border to school.

The Taoiseach’s Shared Island Unit recently agreed to fund 250 places in Nursing at Ulster University’s Magee campus in Derry, 80 per cent of them for southern applicants. Anecdotally, the two university campuses in Belfast are awash with southerners. Yet the barriers to travel in the opposite direction go up, in no small part as a presumably unintended consequence of grade inflation. Leaving Cert – A Level equivalencies have also played their part, and they are currently the subject of a working group that I am chairing.

The fourth category are those who live outside Ireland. Some of them take the IB, some go through the school systems of other states. Importantly, many of those youngsters taking those exams in other countries are the children of Irish emigrants, some of them serving this country in diplomacy, business, industry, culture. For many of them, this country is home. Different residency rules may apply to fees, but in terms of qualifications they are at the very least entitled to a level playing field.

There are options for how that is created. One is to bring the grades gradually down to normal over, say, a three-year period, something Minister Foley had been hinting at until a few weeks ago. Another would be to bring them down in one fell swoop and simultaneously protect places for that year’s cohort, by limiting the numbers of places for Covid-era students (for example, at approximately the percentage that previous years’ students used to be awarded until 2019).

That might mean different entry points for the same course for students entering from different Leaving Cert years, but since the results across the years are clearly not directly comparable, this would be fair. What is not fair is continuing as we are.

And a final thought: if other countries catch on to our continued grade inflation, they may devalue our Leaving Cert, which will have knock-on consequences for Irish students wishing to study abroad in future years. It is time to put this right.

Pól Ó Dochartaigh is Deputy President and Registrar of the University of Galway