Madam, - The annual dissection of the Leaving Certificate results is under way in the media once again. The guiding rule is simple: lots of high grades equals "good"; more low grades equals "bad".
Ninety-six per cent getting honours in music is automatically assumed to be a positive outcome. Nearly a fifth failing lower level biology is assumed to be a negative outcome. There is a problem in biology. There is no problem in music. Viewed from the immediate perspective of the individual student or parent, the problem may seem obvious. Biology is just too difficult.
Obviously things are not nearly so simple. If they were, all we would have to do is make every exam so easy that every student would get good results. It is hardly the objective of the Leaving Certificate, however, to simply please everyone. On the contrary, its function is dispassionately to measure the level of learning which each student has achieved and to identify the wide achievement range that will inevitably exist anywhere there is a real challenge.
It is deeply troubling when the immediate response of the Minister for Education to high failure rates in maths is a promise of curriculum change. Make maths easier and the problem will be solved: hardly, I think. "User-friendly" is the new euphemism for "easy" when calls are made to dumb down curriculums. TUI president Paddy Healy was reported in your edition of August 13th as rejecting suggestions that the long trend of annual increases in honour grades was due to dumbing down by insisting that the improvements were due to more user-friendly courses and less rigid marking. It's rather like insisting that we get no bad weather, just lots of wind and rain.
The kind of simplistic thinking that currently passes for analysis of the Leaving Certificate results is of no value whatever. Anyone who lectures in the third-level sector, as I do, will have long recognised that passing a subject or even getting relatively good grades is no guarantee that much has been learned. On third-level courses we are faced increasingly with students who have cleared the Leaving Certificate and the CAO hurdles, yet cannot spell, write a grammatical sentence or demonstrate rudimentary numerical skills.
Even students with average or above-average CAO points have a concept of learning that extends no further than writing down their lecturers' words verbatim, learning them by rote and regurgitating them on to examination papers. When challenged to understand, think and solve problems, they are all at sea.
I am all for curriculum change in the Leaving Certificate programme. Where it is needed and what is needed will not be discovered by simply comparing the numbers who pass, fail or get certain grades in different subjects.
On morning radio last June, just before the examinations began, I heard a teacher offer advice to students that the way to get a good mark on the English essay was to go in with a well-prepared topic and work your prepared essay around one of the titles on the paper. He reassured listeners that the titles were always such that this was easily done.
I began to see where our third-level students' notion of education as rote-learning stems from. If that is the measure of creative writing, it is not hard to appreciate the folly in predicting ability to write from grades achieved in the English exam. The same is true for other subjects.
For the good of society in general we need to shift our focus away from counts of grades achieved and on to what exactly is being measured by those grades. - Yours, etc,
MARTIN O'GRADY, Farranwilliam, Ardfert, Co Kerry.