A chara, – The Minister for Education’s modest attempts at reform are welcome but I suggest much more radical reform is required. The traditional Leaving Certificate examination has not changed substantially over the years, despite some welcome and modest reform in recent years. Currently, students are assessed mainly by written examinations in most subject areas. It would be difficult to imagine a more educationally regressive system that required students of mathematics, Irish, biology, French and history to spend 15 hours and 30 minutes doing written assessments over three days with two examinations in different disciplines each day in the 2022 Leaving examination.
First, the Leaving Certificate programme should be modularised and assessed over a two-year period, possibly at Christmas and summer of each year, when students undertake in-house assessments in their schools including a mock Leaving Cert assessment. Second, the subject specialists and the experts in the field are the people best placed to decide what to assess and how to assess at each stage of the continuum and what weighting should be allocated to each assessment. This weighting could vary from subject to subject.
I am not suggesting four mini-versions of the current system with the associated stress. Four assessments including continuous assessment and sit-down examinations over a two-year period would allow for the use of different assessment methods as well as examining a greater cross-section of each subject area. Two or three assessment points may be more appropriate for some subjects.
Students should be given the results and feedback after each assessment as constructive feedback is a key element of learning. What feedback other than a grade did most of us receive after doing the Leaving Certificate examination? An essential element of this proposed system is assessments should be marked externally and independently.
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I am somewhat bewildered by the reaction to the Minister’s proposal that boys would be disadvantaged more as they mature later than girls. Surely this disadvantage applies to the Junior Cycle assessment and has applied for years at the Leaving Cert, as this maturity gap does not disappear overnight. – Yours, etc,
SEÁN de BRÚN,
Associate Professor,
Head of the Department
of Language and Literacy
Education,
Mary Immaculate College,
Limerick.