WHAT IS THE POINTS?

This being the silly season where nothing much happens, the media have an annual field day with the Leaving Cert results, which came out this week gone by. Acres of newsprints covered the topic, much of it filler commentary that could have been transcribed from last year’s newspaper editions, such were the similarities.

The same old views are expressed, the same people make the same sane recommendations, the Department of Education agrees to consider them and a year later, nothing has happened.

Tomorrow, the CAO publishes the offer list and students are faced with another harrowing experience as they digest the offers and make a decision, which send them on a life-changing route and maps the future the rest of their lives.

Second – level education is fundamentally flawed in Ireland. By default, this leaves third-level education flawed by the CAO points system.

At secondary level, we are teaching our kids how to pass exams, not educate them. We educate them to score points that will get them their preferred place in college, but not necessarily the course most suitable to their attributes.

Career guidance in our secondary schools is so poor that it is beyond belief. It is merely a nameplate on an office in which sits somebody more intent on achieving high points for the school than the interest of the pupil. That is maybe too much of a generalization and harsh on some good people in the system, but by and large it is a fact.

The Leaving Cert should be abolished, and replaced by a five-year continuous assessment system. There should be an exam in the middle of that period that would define the status of a pupil for the final years of their secondary education.

At present everything is geared towards a two or three-hour exam at the end of five years.

A pupil could be sick on the day, freeze with nerves or have domestic worries that wrecks five years of good work.

Their entire future and life is determined by that exam and that most brief of periods. Mess it up and their career course takes a different direction that may lead them into a dead-end job doing what they don’t like just to make ends meet.

Not alone that, but the points system emanating from those results can ensure that a person who may have an aptitude for the career that the other higher qualified person hates, doesn’t get the opportunity to follow it.

The only way forward is continuous assessment during secondary level education. After that the points system must be altered so that students are not selecting courses in advance of exams as at present. Continuous assessment would ensure that the aptitude of the student is matched to the course rather than the current carriage-before-the-horse situation.

Every year at this time, the same old changes are advocated, and then forgotten about.

It is time to do something – now!