It is a time for cool heads. Yes, there will be students who are disappointed with their results. Yes, there will be those who will worry that an opportunity has slipped from their grasp. But the big picture could scarcely be more encouraging; those getting their exam results have never had it so good.
For the student receiving results today there have never been so many options. More than 34,000 places are available at third level and 20,000 in post-Leaving Certificate courses (PLCs) leading directly to employment or further education. With 5,000 apprenticeships available, 1,000 nursing places and more than 2,000 CERT vacancies, this year's Leaving Cert class is truly spoiled for choice.
We are now in an era of mass higher education. Third level is no longer solely the preserve of the privileged few. There are about 116,000 students enrolled at third-level colleges today, compared to just 21,000 students in 1965. In that year 12,000 students sat the Leaving Cert, compared to almost 60,000 today.
The Leaving Certificate remains at the epicentre of the Irish educational experience. There has been some tinkering with the mechanism (for example, the Leaving Cert Applied and Leaving Cert Vocational) but the exam has not fundamentally changed since 672 mainly privileged students sat it in 1926.
There is a great deal wrong with the Leaving Cert in its present form. Its tends to reward memory rather than creative thinking and practical experience. It favours the generalist and all-rounder over the specialist. It imposes an often intolerable level of stress on young students and their parents.
For all that, the Leaving has some considerable virtues. The exams are conducted in a transparent, efficient and impartial way. Unlike other areas of Irish public life, there is no premium for business connections or political cronyism; the work of every candidate is assessed in the same way.
The examination also has the very considerable benefit of widespread public support. In an Irish Times/MRBI poll earlier this year most respondents said the exam was a fair means of allocating places at third level. More revealingly, 69 per cent of those polled expressed general satisfaction with the educational system in the State, which remains dominated by the Leaving Certificate exams.
The Points Commission assessed the university entry system last year and was broadly supportive of the Leaving Cert. The exam, it said, should be retained as the primary method of selection for third level. The various alternatives - including a shift to continuous assessment - were problematic and incapable of gathering the broad support of the public, it said.
In truth, the Leaving Cert these days is much less of a level playing field for every candidate. A survey last week confirmed that up to 70 per cent of middle-class Leaving Cert students are supplementing their classroom work with grinds in particular subjects. Grinds, Christmas/Easter revision courses and the like are a good, pragmatic option for those who can afford them. But there is a clear danger that those without the resources for additional grinds could be losing out.
There are other worrying inconsistencies about the Leaving Cert. The Department of Education's decision to investigate the substantial variations in marking is an overdue acknowledgement of what students and teachers already know: some subjects are much easier than others. In the points treadmill, students will often seek out subjects like geography, home economics or accounting which have better points potential than subjects like history and Irish.
It is a difficult balancing act: the chief examiner in each subject wants to maintain the highest academic standards, but the Department also has a wider responsibility to ensure that students are not penalised for pursuing certain subject options over others.
The Department has other problems to address if it wants to make the Leaving Cert more practical and more responsive to the needs of the economy and society generally. The National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, the group which advises the Minister for Education on curriculum changes, wants to see the oral and practical dimension of the Leaving Cert widened, especially in science subjects.
The Republic's remains one of the few education systems which does not offer practical exams in science, something which may explain the relatively poor take-up of physics and chemistry to Leaving Cert level. Of the 60,000 students taking the Leaving Cert, only about 8,500 studied physics and only about 6,600 completed chemistry.
In keeping with the Government's exhortations, the Department would like to alter the science courses radically and make them more attractive to students. The problem is that the entire oral/practical system is already at breaking point, with school managers very reluctant to release teachers from their own schools in the run-in to the written exams in June.
The exam system is facing one other serious problem; the reluctance of experienced teachers to correct the exams. The employment this year of third-level students to correct papers at Junior Cert level may be a straw in the wind. Choice may be expanding as never before for the students, but the morale of their teachers is no longer as buoyant.