Richard Hogan: This is why this year's Leaving Cert students are getting a raw deal

Richard Hogan: "Normative events of childhood maturation and development were denied to this class, and now we are going to correct the insanity of inflated grades by hitting them with some sort of exam tariff?" Picture: Moya Nolan.

I’m sitting in one of those awful plastic, duck egg blue chairs that damages your posture for life. The chair needs a good dollop of W40; it’s squeaking with every breath.

The hall is quiet, well, except for my chair and heavy breathing. I can smell ink. The clock is ticking away like a bomb.

An invigilator stomps up and down the passageway. I’m looking at the exam. It’s in a language I don’t understand.

Students are smiling away, furiously writing the answers. How can this be? I haven’t learned this language and this exam is important; in fact, I have just realised I’m doing this exam for the third or fourth time.

Why can’t I remember how many times I have had to repeat this exam? Why haven’t I studied? Why won’t my hand move this gigantic pen.

Salvador Dali, would enjoy this moment. Something wonderful would be painted. I have been having the same nightmare, on and off, for about 30 years. Ever since I sat that old Irish rite of passage, that traumatising end exam of formal education: Ye Olde Leaving Certificate.

Most students go through this process, and most will be having nightmares for many years to come.

But this year has a slightly different feel to it. The nightmare feels slightly more real.

We all know the CAO points have been inflated since the pandemic.

As an educator, the results some students were achieving was mindboggling. H2 and H1 grades were handed out like Smarties!

Everyone seemed to be getting 500 plus points. It just seemed out of control. One Leaving Cert cohort didn’t even have to do the exam. It was crazy. We lobbed a grenade into the system. Predictive grades always have a bias towards inflation.

Also, the options offered by the Department of Education and Skills in the exam all saw points soar over the last five years. But now, there is talk of a “soft landing” for this trend of inflated grades. ‘A soft landing’. Dear Jesus, where have I heard that phrase before?

I remember the music for Glenroe on a Sunday night, Like Pavlov and his bloody dog, it sent a shiver down my spine. For the music signalled the end of the weekend and my first thoughts of homework and the long school week ahead. Awful.

Well, the phrase “soft landing” has the same effect. I remember Bertie Ahern uttering it as I drove to West Cork in 2006.

There was going to be a soft landing for the economy. “Why does the economy need a landing?” I thought. What a naive young man I was.

“A soft landing” actually meant economic annihilation and years of suffering.

Now, the class of 2025 are being told, “a soft landing” is coming. Haven’t this cohort of students experienced enough? These are the kids that missed out on so much because of the pandemic.

Normative events of childhood maturation and development were denied to this class, and now we are going to correct the insanity of inflated grades by hitting them with some sort of exam tariff?

The reason it is unfair, is because there are always a significant number of students in the system from the previous exam year, waiting to see the CAO offers.

Their results will be considerably higher than this year’s results, and that, put simply, isn’t fair.

I don’t envy the minister for education Helen McEntee’s position here. Of course we need it to come back to pre-2020 levels. But surely there is a more equitable way to deliver this change. Ringfencing a proportion of CAO places for the class of 2025 seems the most equitable way to proceed.

It just isn’t fair to lump them all together. If you’re the parent of a student doing the Leaving Cert this summer, my advice would be to try to keep their minds off this particular aspect of this year’s exam.

I would also sign the petition going around, to put pressure on the Government to think further on this issue.

But I would be trying to get my student to concentrate on what they can control, and that is the knowledge they have going into the exam.

The Leaving Cert is less than two months away, what they learn now they will recall in the exam. I would help them to focus on the exam and how to study over the next seven weeks.

I would help them leave the phone out of their study sessions, while also giving them advice about taking time off.

Students often burnout at this particular stage of the process. They think they are so close now that they have to go all out with their study, and this is not so. Two months is a long time to study and a lot can be achieved.

I have often seen it at this point, they pull back on all the things they enjoy and just put all efforts into study. This is not a healthy approach.

When we want to achieve anything in life, we need to have rest and downtime as part of that process.

This allows the brain to grow back the receptors that have been damaged due to stress.

Helping your student to take time off is as important as helping them to get focused on the exam.

Whatever happens this year, the only thing that they can control right now is how they approach the next seven weeks of study.