End this senseless farce

The release of the results of the Leaving Certificate this year was greeted with the usual ludicrous media hype and hullabaloo. The main story was an apparent disappointment with the failure rate in Maths and Science. And there was the by now utterly predictable news that girls had done better than boys.

Overall the marking seems to have been a bit tougher this year, a response perhaps to the accusation of ‘dumbing down’ that had been levelled at the exam. But in the end you have to ask: just how has this ongoing farce been allowed to fester for so long?
We all know that there is no perfect exam system. But anyone with a feel for what education should really be about must be aware that the Leaving Cert is no longer fit for purpose – if indeed it ever was.
Don’t get me wrong. I know there are virtues to an exam system that gets everyone into a room at the same time, asks them the same questions and judges them on what they can produce in the time allotted for the paper. Whatever predispositions exist in a school or prejudices individual teachers might build up against specific pupils are completely submerged in a process that has the benefit of complete anonymity.
Fine. But that is about the only virtue we can now attach to a process which has produced such a thoroughly distorted end result for so long that it is beyond a joke.
Is there anyone who believes even for a minute that the Leaving Cert and CAO process means that students are matched to the most appropriate third level courses? That we are getting a flow of good career doctors into medicine, for example? Or really accomplished writers into journalism? Or that the people who qualify to study psychology, for which 550 points are now required, might ultimately have the nuanced people skills, the empathy and the understanding necessary to work as counselling psychologists in the long run?
The answer is that only a fool could imagine this to be the case. It is perfectly obvious, for example, that there was a crisis in medicine, which had for many years been among the subjects requiring the highest quota of Leaving Cert points. No disrespect to women, but the disproportion between males and females qualifying to do medicine by achieving the highest available points level of 600, should have set alarm bells ringing years ago. Finally, far too late, in 2009 aptitude tests were introduced which restored a semblance of balance. But tellingly, even this was challenged by those who favour the status quo.
But why should medicine be different to any other specialised subject? It isn’t – except that the inequality in this arena became impossible to avoid, as women doctors, quite understandably you might say, left their profession to bring up their families, leaving the country woefully short of fully qualified doctors.
The introduction of an aptitude test may or may not deliver a better result in terms of the quality of those entering medical school. But it will at least deliver more long-term working doctors.
The logical question now is: if an aptitude test is a good idea in relation to medicine, might it not also be a good idea in relation to dentistry or journalism or psychology or science – or indeed any other course you care to mention?
But there is another, far more pertinent question which should be asked first. To put it at its most stark: are boys stupider than girls? Less likely to make good workers in the long run? Less fit to be doctors or to fulfil any of those other roles that require the highest levels of points?
The answer, of course, is no, no and no again. And so the next question is: why have we, in the Leaving Cert, the syllabus that is set down, and the way it is taught and examined, produced a system of education and pupil assessment which is so clearly anti-male in its bias?
There is an obvious reason: the Leaving Cert rewards those things that girls are more inclined to be good at and it ignores or under-values those things which boys tend to be more inclined towards.
One of the key issues here is that it specifically rewards rote learning. That is, it rewards the uncritical reproduction of reams of stuff learned off by heart in grind schools. It rewards conformism. It rewards swotting at the expense of other aspects of living. It rewards narrowness.
Few truly want this to continue apart from the grind schools, which thrive in the present situation. Virtually everyone else in education recognises how fundamentally misguided the entire edifice is. And yet it is only in relation to medicine that anything has been done to address the problem.
The malaise runs far deeper than anyone at official level has been prepared to acknowledge. There has been lots of guff about the smart economy and needing students to do a lot better in maths and science. But if the system remains the same, we will keep getting the same results – that is, some of those doing maths and science will be as unsuited to long-term careers in the smart economy as were those who swotted their way into the available places in medicine.
In relation to journalism, many of the best writers to come through Hot Press were completely unqualified. Some of them failed their Leaving Cert or started working straight after school in relatively menial jobs. Others were college drop-outs. But they all had what it took; they were, and are, naturals – including many of the current leading lights, including Olaf Tyaransen, Stuart Clark, Peter Murphy and Craig Fitzsimons. None of them would have got within an ass’s roar of a place on a journalism course under the points system. Meanwhile, there are loads of students doing courses, including journalism, whose aptitudes would be far better suited to other fields – which of course they can’t get into because someone swotted them aside.
Of course this is a deliberate generalisation, and there are lots of wonderfully honourable exceptions, but up to Leaving Cert level, girls are more likely to do what is expected, that is they learn to reproduce the stuff that teachers (and therefore those that are marking the papers) seem to want.
Are boys more likely to go be independent, rebellious, implicitly critical – and possibly even disaffected – in their approach. Probably. But the fact is that, disaffection aside, those qualities are essential in our adult development and should be encouraged. And therefore they should be rewarded in whatever system is used to test or measure students at the end of the secondary education process. The Leaving Cert rewards conformity. Life doesn’t.
There is, in truth, no way that you can legislate for every situation. But what we can say definitively is that any exam which produces results which are intrinsically prejudicial to the reality that the sexes are equal has got it wrong. It has to be changed, and in a way that encourages a far more rounded kind of education.
Is there anyone out there with the bottle to give it a go?