Educator calls for end to points system

A UNIVERSITY president has called for the points system used to select college entrants to be scrapped.

Dublin City University president Professor Ferdinand von Prondzynski made the comments in the context of what he described as the need to move from a professional to an enterprise culture.

“It is now widely understood that Ireland needs to be a knowledge society and have an innovation culture to succeed in a globalised world. But do we really understand what that means?” he asked.

Addressing DCU graduates at a conferring ceremony yesterday, Prof von Prondzynski said it requires not just top-class education and high-value research, but something more.

“We need to value initiative, risk-taking and personal courage, and become less fixated on ‘secure’ and ‘respectable’ professions such as the legal profession and the civil service,” he said.

“But above all, if we are to succeed, we need to think seriously about abandoning the points system for third-level entry, as it pushes people into the wrong careers and sets up the wrong values for the new Ireland,” he said.

The view that school leavers may be pushed to seek places on courses solely based on the status attached to their Leaving Certificate points’ requirements is not a new one. But Professor von Prondzynski’s remarks could spark a debate about the points system, which has been in use for college entry since the early 1970s.

A review carried out for the Department of Education in 1999 recommended no major changes to the system, which is used to help the Central Applications Office allocate almost 40,000 third level places annually. Just over two-thirds of CAO applicants earlier this year sat the Leaving Certificate in June.

Education Minister Mary Hanafin is about to announce changes to the entry requirements for the limited places in medical schools which have up to now meant applicants need near-perfect Leaving Certificate results. The compromise reached between her officials and universities is that those with at least 480 out of 600 points and certain scores in an aptitude test will be eligible, although points up to 550 will give applicants a higher chance of success.

However, the changes — revealed in the Irish Examiner last June — will not come into effect until after Leaving Certificate 2009, seven years after the last Programme for Government promised to reduce pressure on school leavers seeking top points for medicine.

Similar changes for other healthcare profession courses such as veterinary medicine, and dentistry are likely to follow in subsequent years.