HOW secure is the Leaving Cert? This is the question that the debacle over the missing Leaving Cert craft work pieces inevitably raises. Can students and parents and teachers have confidence in the procedures for other Leaving Cert subjects? Is Leaving Cert marking arbitrary, or is the case of the 49 art students from last year merely an abberation, an unfortunate once off accident?

The Exams Branch of the Department of Education in Athlone, Co Westmeath, has always been proud of its record in handling over one million separate exam scripts from some 130,000 Junior and Leaving Cert students each year. It's a huge logistical operation, as is the organising and overseeing of the correcting process which involves nearly 6,000 individual examiners of written, oral and practical exams, as well as the setting, printing and proofing of the exam papers.

The scope for error is enormous and in many ways the wonder is that it does not happen more often.

The increase in non written forms of examining in recent years added whole new layers of potential for mistakes. The exams branch now processes a quarter of a million oral exams each year which are undertaken by 1,000 examiners visiting schools around Easter. In construction studies and engineering the Leaving Cert exam has three elements written paper, practical exam and a practical project. This means three separate sets of marks from three different types of exam to be colated.

Collating all of these newer forms of examining has added enormously to the work of the exams' branch of the Department of Education. Yet it has a permanent staff of just 75 people to handle all of this. During the peak period of exams in June they take on an additional 70 or so temporary staff. John White, assistant general secretary of the ASTI, feels that they are understaffed and the union has called for more staff to be appointed to the section.

"They are working under enormous pressure and are handling higher numbers of exam candidates and more varied material each year and they need extra staff in order to ensure that all the correct procedures are followed and that time can be taken to check everything," says White.

Despite the normal bickering about exams which is endemic in schools, there is considerable sympathy for the exams' branch. ASTI president Tommy Francis emphasises that they and the individual examiners are a dedicated bunch of people doing their best and that, given the amount of material they handle, mistakes are rare.

And even those who, like Tony Deffeley, president of the TUI, are critical of aspects of the examining of Leaving Cert art, agree, on the whole that the system is pretty secure. Overall it is a thorough system and parents and students can have confidence in it," he says. "There is a very detailed system of checks and cross checks and these are taken very seriously by individual examiners and by the department."

Starting with the marking. A senior departmental inspector is the chief examiner for each subject assisted by a chief advising examiner who is usually a teacher with many years of experience of examining. In a large subject like English or Irish there is also a team of assistant advising examiners. Their job collectively is to co ordinate the team of actual correctors or assistant examiners as they are called who are mostly teachers and to ensure that marking standards are monitored.

They draw up a marking scheme for the subject, allocating marks, to each section of the paper and noting in detail points and facts which students would be expected to give and allocating marks to them.

THE correctors for the particular subject are then summoned to a day long marking conference at the exams branch of the department in Athlone. The advising examiners explain the marking scheme and brief the correctors. Photocopies of randomly selected exam scripts are marked by everyone and discussed, the idea being to establish a common standard and approach to the marking.

Back home with their bag of scripts each corrector selects 20 scripts at random and marks them. Copies of a few of those are sent back to the advising examiners plus the overall statistics on all 20. The advising examiners check those to ascertain if the marking scheme is working properly and also to monitor if everyone is marking according to the same standard.

Each corrector has to return detailed sheets of statistics on their marking regularly to their advising examiner the advising examiners meet to monitor these statistics and blips indicating anything unusual should be spotted through this process.

Examiners are not exactly given target percentages for A1s, B2s etc but in each subject the percentage of each grade given in previous years is regarded as a rough benchmark. Thus, if there were 1.3 per cent of A1s in Irish last year and a corrector starts returning 12 per cent in 1996, alarm bells will ring Her work will probably he inspected, but if the advising examiner is satisfied that she has got a particularly bright bunch then it is accepted.

There are only exam numbers on the scripts so correctors have no idea of the name, sexy or school of the candidates. Each corrector sends back detailed statistical information on the exam candidates in their batch of scripts.

BACK in Athlone the marks are entered in the computer and collated with oral or practical marks in the same subject to produce a composite mark. Each subject is treated totally separately and the examiners in any one subject do not know how a student is performing in any other. The last step is for the computer to bring each student's six or seven subject results together and print out the final Leaving Cert result.

In the case of practical and oral tests, the examiners and exam supervisors are required to return detailed attendance lists and descriptions of practical work which is intended as a safeguard against any aspect of a student's exam being ignored.

The facility for requesting to have one's Leaving Cert results re checked is the final safeguard built into the system. When a re check request is made the first step is to do a clerical check to ensure that all of the elements of the candidates' exam were included and that there was no mistake in totting up results or entering them in the computer.

If nothing shows up here, the exam script is then sent to a new examiner who corrects it again from scratch. The chief examiner is supposed to have a look at re check scripts before a final decision is made. Last year 534 were upgraded at higher level (see graphic).

Tony Deffeley believes that this is a reasonable network of checks and safeguards and that, in general the procedures "are as secure as you can make them." That is, when they work and he agrees that in the case of Leaving Cert art last year, the safeguards did not work.

To take the standardisation of marks first in September last the Minister for Education suddenly announced that there had been a problem with the marking of art by one examiner and that 359 candidates were being upgraded as a result.

So how did this happen? How did it not come to light through the elaborate monitoring system of advising examiners? There have been complaints about "erratic" marking in art over a number of years and dissatisfaction at the low proportion of high grades (see bar chart). But there is consolation in the fact that the exams branch did discover the error albeit a week or two late and that this happened spontaneously without the students seeking a re check.

In the 1995 art exam, the checks and balances failed at the re check stage. The Ursuline Convent in Sligo did apply to have the art results of its students re checked and none was upgraded. How did the re checking system fail to notice that in a separate practical segment of the exam (craft work), which represented one quarter of the total marks, the girls were registering no marks at all?

Another worrying point is why assuming they were done the detailed reports from the supervisor of the practical exams showing the girls to have sat the craft work exam, did, did not alert anybody to look he pieces?

Reassurance to students sitting the exam in 1996 is the fact that the Minister has commissioned Price Waterhouse, an accountancy firm, to investigate these questions and that she has committed herself to implementing whatever recommendations they make to ensure it does not happen again.