Students’ best efforts sabotaged by arbitrary and unfair points system

DID you find yourself listening to the radio with a grin on your face the other day?

I know I did. I was on the road a lot, and as usual when I have a long journey to make I found myself flicking through the various news channels on the radio. And everywhere, it was great news. It’s not often, these days, that the news on the radio makes you smile.

All over the place, there were reports from outside schools as students were getting their Leaving Cert results. There seemed to be very little doubt that the class of 2010 had good reason to be pleased with themselves, and their parents proud of them.

You could hear squeals of excitement as the envelopes were torn open, and a lot of satisfaction (“Oh, my God”... ) as the points were totted up. A real buzz of excitement was evident everywhere, and lots of talk about the celebrations to come.

Every year at this time I find myself remembering my own Leaving Cert, as I’m sure most of us do. The tension, almost amounting to fear, that I would let the side down and that the results wouldn’t be enough to get into college – and to pay for it.

In those days, a lot of students had the added pressure that the results had to do more than qualify you to get into university. You also had to qualify for what was known as a county council scholarship and that meant your results had to be in the top few in your county.

But we’ll come back to the old days in a minute. I’m just hoping that the excitement so evident a few days ago hasn’t been destroyed by the publication of the CAO points table yesterday.

Put it another way. According to the statistics available at www.examinations.ie, 4,857 students did economics for the Leaving Cert. Nearly 80% of them did the honours level paper and more than two-thirds of them got an honours result. So, they will have graduated their Leaving Certs with a good theoretical understanding of the law of supply and demand.

But they, and every other student who sat the exam, will have got a very harsh lesson in that most basic law of free market economics this morning.

I don’t know, for example, how many of this year’s Leaving Cert crop of students want to do science in UCD. Up to the weekend, the CAO website could help them to discover that the entry requirement last year was 385 points. But yesterday morning, the list published by the CAO announced that the requirement this year is 435 points. That’s a huge jump and, according to the papers, the jump is mirrored all over the place.

Science is up 25 points at NUI Galway and 20 points at TCD. Biological and chemical science is up 25 to 375 points at UCC. And the same is true in the social sciences – up 15 at TCD to 465, up 20 at UCC to 390.

If you did the Leaving Cert with a view to studying nursing in UCD, you might well have been studying the entry requirements posted on the UCD website. It specifies Leaving Cert passes (and at least two Cs in higher courses) in six subjects, including Irish, English, maths, one laboratory science subject and two other recognised subjects.

Well, however brilliantly you did against those requirements, I hope it added up to 400 points because that’s the new requirement. It’s up at least 10 (and it’s gone up in Trinity and Galway as well).

There’s a terrible arbitrariness and unfairness about all this, and there’s also a huge irony. Two things affect the points requirements for entry to third-level education – population growth and recession.

It’s possible (although we’re not very good at it) to anticipate and plan for population change.

But recessions always mean that students just out of school are competing with people who are out of work. In a recession, that means fewer students are going to get into college, in the courses they want – but in a recession is precisely the time we need to be getting more students into higher education.

The higher the level of educational attainment, the more likely we are to have full employment. If we limit the chances of students, we’re only guaranteeing a brain drain abroad and the loss of skill to our future economic needs.

And we need to be very clear about one thing. Higher points is not a reflection of higher standards – in fact there’s no relationship whatever between points and standards. The points system is nothing more than a way of rationing scarce places.

And the points system is doubly unfair because it raises the bar after the exam is over. None of our students will ever again have to apply for a job where the criteria for selection are changed after the closing date for applications. If they do, they will have a legal case under employment law and might well be able to take an anti-discrimination case for good measure.

In the old days (when I was a lad), two Leaving Cert honours and three passes would qualify you for entry to university. I was lucky enough, back then, to win a county council scholarship – worth £50 a year when the fees were £55. When the old scholarship system was done away with and the university grants scheme bought in, four honours were necessary to guarantee both your place and the funding that went with it.

If you got your honours, you travelled to your chosen university on registration day, wandered among alphabetically arranged tables outlining the options and syllabus, and chose your course on the spot.

IF you hadn’t thought it through properly (as many of us didn’t) you might stop at one of the early tables and end up doing arts or commerce because they were featured on one of the first tables you saw.

Not the best way to plan your future, I accept. But the point was that students had certainty then – targets to aim at when they were doing the Leaving and a guarantee that they could pick the course of their choice if they got the results.

Of course, we could argue quite separately about whether the Leaving Cert is really the best way to measure a student’s progress or capacity and about the pressures that young people are under throughout the entire exam system. But when they endure the pressure and they get the results the system demands, and then the bar is raised afterwards for reasons that have nothing to do with them, that’s surely entirely unfair.

It may well be that we are lucky enough to have the brightest and most exciting young generation in our history. Certainly I meet young people all the time, in all sorts of environments, whose confidence and ability astonish me.

Isn’t it all the more unfair then that we can’t give them a fair shake at one of the most pivotal moments of their lives? And isn’t it long past time that we scrapped this entirely arbitrary and unfair points race?