Students union demands action on exams reform

STUDENTS are seeking an urgent move to reform the Junior and Leaving Certificate exams and how young people are tested throughout their second-level education.

After completion of the state exams last week much focus is also being placed on the role of the State Examinations Commission (SEC) which took over the operation of the exam system from the Department of Education in 2003.

The Irish Second-Level Students’ Union (ISSU) said the department should act on recommendations on junior cycle reform as soon as they are made available.

The National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) is taking submissions on changes to how younger students are tested in various subjects during the three years of junior cycle, following a call last summer from then Education Minister Batt O’Keeffe for a reduction in the workload required for Junior Certificate students.

The ISSU is also urging current minister, Tánaiste Mary Coughlan, to reconsider significant reform of senior cycle education, previously proposed by the NCCA but rejected as being too costly by previous minister Mary Hanafin.

“It seems that now more than ever a complete revamp of the whole examination system is needed. To perform at your optimum ability for 300 minutes so as to be examined on two years of work is unrealistic, unfair and stressful,” it said.

Although the union welcomed an apparent move this summer towards less predictable papers and questions which relied less on rote learning than in other years, it said it was unfair on this year’s school-leavers to break away from age-old patterns. The ISSU suggested such a change may have been the result of focus on grade inflation in recent years, and claims that the exams system has been dumbed down, making it easier to get higher grades.

The SEC has come in for criticism during this year’s exams because of a number of errors on some papers, including the issuing of higher level Leaving Certificate accounting exams missing almost half the questions to students at 16 south Dublin schools. The previous week calculation errors were spotted on a Junior Certificate higher level business studies question, while claims of cheating in exam centres were also prominent, although this may have been more due to the discussion of the exams on social networking websites.