Is the points race really over?

The initial headlines that greeted the 2006 Leaving Cert results were downbeat. The results in Maths and Science were bad, we were told. There was more than a bit of hand-wringing. A lot of students – plenty of Hot Press readers among them – must have felt pretty glum. But that, it turns out, was a false alarm.
As the full implications of the results sank in, and the CAO calculations were revealed, there was a reversal: the news, it turned out, was good. In fact it was very good. Now, the headlines in the newspapers heralded the end of the points race as we know it. You could sense that those who had been subjected to the ordeal of sitting the Leaving in June were breathing a collective sigh of relief. It’s over. And we got away with it…
Good on you – now go and enjoy yourselves!
If indeed the Points Race is in its death throes, and we are at the end of what has been a truly awful period in Irish educational history, then it is an outcome greatly to be celebrated.
This year, the points required to secure a place in the vast majority of college courses took a significant tumble. Why? On the one hand, a smaller number of students sat the exam. On the other, a higher number of places were on offer in a greater number of colleges and courses. Analysts say that even when the numbers sitting the exam begin to creep up again, the points requirements are unlikely to.
Suddenly, it seems that the heavy pressure is off. Well, the sound of that balloon deflating is music to my ears, for one. It couldn’t come soon enough.
For almost thirty years, secondary education in Ireland has been dominated by the points system. And the effect of this has been hugely detrimental to the quality and breadth of the education which students receive in secondary school. Ask the students themselves and they’d tell you. They might express it in different ways, but the gist of it was that it was all too mechanical, too narrow, too expedient.
The entire educational process, in effect, was designed with the aim of of maximising the number of points racked up as its No.1 priority. When you talked to teachers, they complained bitterly too. They knew that their job should be about more than simply preparing pupils to get through an exam in the most efficient manner possible. But they also knew that if they didn’t put exam results at the top of the agenda, then the parents, the school and even, in some cases, the students themselves, would resent it.
God, how I have loathed the entirely false and supercilious emphasis on the whole charade in the media over the past few years in particular. Anyone with a bit of life experience knows that the Leaving Cert is just a small way station along the path to maturity. Better to do well than not, fine. But to have built a system that elevates it to the status of Holy Grail has to have been a cardinal error in educational terms. And the result of all of this? A huge number of kids coming out of school, mesmerised by the entire construct of the CAO set-up and the race for points, ended up doing third level courses for which they were entirely unsuited just because they could.
I remember talking to a lecturer in Architecture about the students he was confronted with in First Year in one of the NUI colleges. These guys were at the top end of points table at the time – even in 2006, it takes 530 points to get into Architecture in UCD. Well, they might have got the points, he said, but they didn’t have a fucking clue how to think. In fact the majority had no idea what they were doing there, or why they wanted to become architects. They didn’t even have a real understanding of what an architect did. Many of them had no aptitude for the subject. They were docile creatures, who had to be thought how to have an independent idea. He found it deeply dispiriting.
The same is true of journalism. In our experience here in Hot Press, a lot of the best and brightest talents over the years would never have come within smelling distance of a journalism course within the points system. Of course it isn’t universally true – but I could reel off any number of names of writers who had no qualification other than the leaving cert, but who are rightly considered to be top (of the) class now.
And, to an extent the converse is also true: in some cases, people ‘do’ journalism who haven’t got any real writing ability and who are unlikely to acquire it. They apply, they get the points and it’s only well down the line that they realise that they are not exactly cut out for a life of whacking out smart copy to meet unforgiving deadlines.
Well, there is, it seems, the beginning of an opportunity now for teachers and schools to behave less like slaves to the points system and more like educators. There is an opportunity also to get away from the cramming and the rote learning that is a betrayal of what education should be about. And finally, there is an opportunity to refocus the way in which classes are run, to prepare students better for the kind of learning they are going to have to do if and when they do go to college.
There are still those courses for which it is essential to be a high Leaving Cert achiever: Medicine, Dental Science and Pharmacy are examples. There is a very serious question as to whether or not we are getting the kind of professionals through in any of these areas that society needs and the answer, I suspect, is a resounding no. But there are other, albeit harder, ways of penetrating those professions for someone who really has a vocation, but falls short.
For the majority though, a few years on, what you get in the Leaving Cert becomes a matter of supreme irrelevance. What should matter is the extent to which, during our schooling, we have internalised life skills, culture, knowledge, a good work ethic, the ability to set ourselves goals and complete them, to encounter problems and solve them – and a love of the process of learning itself, of discovering new things and mastering them, whether it’s the language of mathematics, music, German, French or science.
That is what education should be about, rather than desperately seeking points at the expense of any quality of life or learning. Let’s hope the end of the Points Race – if indeed that is what is upon us – heralds a step forward to that more integrated place where education really belongs.
Now that would be a momentous thing.