Leaving Cert Irish and maths ready for their makeover

BY ALL accounts, Sarah Fitzgerald is a model student.

Throughout her school life she has consistently achieved good grades, she gets on well with her teachers, and she was appointed deputy head girl of her school in north Dublin, in recognition of her exemplary record.

But like many students nowadays, Sarah struggles with the stresses imposed on her by the Leaving Certificate. An ESRI study on the Leaving Certificate concluded last year that more than half of female students and one third of males doing the exams felt stressed out.

Sarah believes the system requires a complete overhaul and that personal development should be prioritised over academic achievement.

“We need to concentrate more on how a person develops, rather than making them just learn off facts. The current curriculum is putting a serious amount of stress on students,” the 18-year-old says, with a worried look on her face.

Sarah was forced to quit her job a few months ago in order to concentrate on her studies and she believes they are putting major strains on relations with friends and family.

“What with study I just don’t get to see my friends nowadays, we’re all stressed. It’s not very fair that our entire academic lives depend on this one series of tests.”

She is not alone in her views. There is growing dissatisfaction with the Leaving Certificate system among students and teachers alike.

Many people believe it puts too much emphasis on learning off information and not enough on applying it practically. And it shows in the statistics. Students are increasingly struggling to relate to the topics they’re learning, and this is contributing to a major decline in those taking higher level maths and Irish.

Currently only about 15% of Leaving Certificate students are sitting the higher-level maths papers and the proportion of those sitting the honours Irish paper is not much higher.

“It’s just not worth the struggle if you’re not good at those subjects,” says Sarah, who will sit her exams at Portmarnock Community School.

“With maths, in particular, it’s automatically difficult. Teachers approach it as if to say ‘look, you’re not going to understand this but let’s try anyway’. Some people struggle on with the higher-level course for the prestige attached to it rather than just doing the sensible thing and dropping down to ordinary level. For me dropping down was the best decision I ever made.”

On the request of previous education minister Mary Coughlan, third-level colleges have agreed to offer bonus points for entry to students with higher level maths from next year on a trial basis. But Sarah thinks this is the wrong way forward.

“No, I don’t believe that offering bonus points is the right thing to do. Instead of doing this, why don’t they just make the courses more approachable for people to study?”

However, proposals are being put forward to radically reverse this alarming decline in numbers doing the honours courses for these subjects. Sweeping changes are being implemented to the Irish exam in future, and with the advent of Project Maths, something similar is on the horizon for the mathematics course.

Within the Irish exam, there will be a major overhaul in the way the subject is taught and examined. Students will no longer have to answer questions on the history of the language. More marks will be awarded for comprehension questions and less for prepared answers on poetry or a play/novel, and Sarah believes these are positive changes.

“It’s better because comprehensions are about understanding what you read rather than just learning off quotes for a poem or a play. And as for the history of the language, it’s no longer relevant really.”

But the biggest change being implemented to the Leaving Certificate Irish exam is the increase in marks awarded for the oral, which will be worth 40% in future, 15% more than what is available to current students. Exam candidates will engage in role-plays and describe picture sequences, and it will now be essential for students to be able to ask as well as answer questions in Irish.

The aim of these changes is to allow students to have a better grasp of the language by speaking it regularly, and to encourage fluency in conversation.

“It gives teachers time to explore ways in the classroom of getting students to practice and use the language”, says Jackie O’Reilly, an Irish teacher at Portmarnock Community School.

She is a fan of the new curriculum, and so is Sarah.

“Increasing the oral is definitely a good idea. It gives students more time to practice the language, and, at the end of the day, the point of learning a language is to be able to speak it fluently and have a conversation in it. I think that’s way more important than learning about the history of the language and stuff like that,” the student says.

The new Irish course was introduced to fifth-year students nationally last September and 2012 will see the new Leaving Certificate higher-level Irish curriculum being examined for the first time.

So student and teacher alike think the new Irish curriculum is a vast improvement on the old one. But what is being done about maths?

THOSE sitting the Leaving Certificate higher-level maths paper in 2014 will be sitting a very different paper to what honours maths students will face in the coming week.

This is because it is expected that 2014 will be the first year the Project Maths syllabus is examined in its entirety. Project Maths is being hailed as the saviour of the subject at Leaving Certificate, involving wholesale changes to what students learn, how they learn it and how they will be assessed.

The course aims to encourage an enhanced learning experience for students, coupled with greater levels of achievement. It will take a more practical approach to maths than the current curriculum, examining the application of mathematical concepts to everyday situations.

A pilot scheme for Project Maths was launched in 24 schools in 2008, and due to its success it is being implemented on a national basis from this year on. Sarah also believes the more practical nature of Project Maths will help students relate more to the subject.

“Yes, a more practical approach to maths would be helpful. We use maths in everyday life, and they need to take a new approach and teach it in a way that people can actually apply it to everyday life. I would definitely be more inclined to take up higher-level maths if it was taught that way.”

The big aim of project maths is to increase uptake of the higher-level maths exam to 30% by 2020. Project Maths began principally as a result of concerns about the low uptake of the higher-level maths exam among students.

According to its dedicated website, .projectmaths.ie, it was also designed to deal with the level of performance of our students in the international context, the difficulties students had in coping with maths at third level, and employers contending that Irish students have poor understanding of mathematical concepts.

So, will Project Maths increase the uptake of the subject at higher level? Sarah believes it will. “Whether it gets up to 30% remains to be seen, but I think there will definitely be an increase in future.”

But it remains to be seen if the changes will improve the way these subjects are taught and understood.

“It’s too late for me now, obviously, but these exams will be better for students in future because they will have that little bit more practicality,” Sarah says.

“The changes were made so that students could get more from what they’re studying, and I believe that they will.”