Is the leaving cert system adequate

Princess Consuela Bananahammock

mikemac1 wrote: »

It was there at the beginning of the nineties.
Twenty years ago.

And if you failed Irish you failed the entire LC

But you're telling the people who did it that you know more about the system then they do

That bit was long gone before the 90s.

In fairness, as a LC student, he probably knows more abotu it now than most of us who did it years ago.

Scanlas The 2nd

I think we should be proud of our LC overall, it's a good system. I've yet to hear better alternatives. People complaining about stress is ridiculous, resources are limited, meaning their will always be competition, the best way of dealing with the stress is psychological and mindfulness.

St.Spodo

The main problem with the Leaving Cert is that it doesn't distinguish between learning and memorising. The skills of critical thinking and challenging ideas aren't honed by exams which encourage students to learn by rote, regurgitate and then forget most of it forever by the time they're on holidays. I think the system needs to be significantly altered.

Ficheall

St.Spodo wrote: »

The main problem with the Leaving Cert is that it doesn't distinguish between learning and memorising. The skills of critical thinking and challenging ideas aren't honed by exams which encourage students to learn by rote, regurgitate and then forget most of it forever by the time they're on holidays.

The same could be said of college...

mikemac1

Ikky Poo2 wrote: »

In fairness, as a LC student, he probably knows more abotu it now than most of us who did it years ago.

Well he thinks twenty years ago is relatively recent and the points system didn't exist in nineties

frozenfrozen

Would I be alone in wanting my doctor to have got say 400 points in their leaving cert and had to work through alternative channels to become a doctor, rather than someone who got 600 points and then just did medicine because they could.

FloatingVoter

frozenfrozen wrote: »

Would I be alone in wanting my doctor to have got say 400 points in their leaving cert and had to work through alternative channels to become a doctor, rather than someone who got 600 points and then just did medicine because they could.

I'd prefer if my GP actually wanted to be a doctor in the first place. His / her knowledge of Irish grammar isn't an issue for me.

GaryIrv93

mikemac1 wrote: »

Well he thinks twenty years ago is relatively recent and the points system didn't exist in nineties

It was a guess. Apologies for not knowing what year points were introduced, but I never said that I knew more about the education system than you or anyone else who did their Leavings back then.

mikemac1

Many adults, who've finished their (then easier) Leaving Certs

But you know about the difficulty of the exams back then

partyatmygaff

frozenfrozen wrote: »

Would I be alone in wanting my doctor to have got say 400 points in their leaving cert and had to work through alternative channels to become a doctor, rather than someone who got 600 points and then just did medicine because they could.

I don't think it makes a huge difference. Either way requires a lot of determination. Doing well in your HPAT and LC or getting a 2.1 in a degree and then going through the hassle of the GAMSAT and graduate medicine is a lot of work.

At the end of the day how someone got in to their course isn't very important. How they actually do in their course makes all the difference.

insua

They just need to continuous assessment that ****

Princess Consuela Bananahammock

mikemac1 wrote: »

Well he thinks twenty years ago is relatively recent and the points system didn't exist in nineties

What it was like twenty years ago is fairly irrelevant. What it's like for students NOW is what should be asked.

St.Spodo

Ficheall wrote: »

The same could be said of college...

I can only refer to my own experience here, but college term essays require personal analysis and critical thinking. With regards to the end of term exams, I'd be inclined to agree.

opinion guy

Confab wrote: »

The stress is caused by students believing the hype about the consequences of getting less than 1000 points.

and more importantly their parents believing that or that little Johnny just has to be a doctor even though he wants to be a sound engineer. He's just young he'll grow out of that bless him. :rolleyes:

Martin_94 wrote: »

In all seriousness- Continuous Assessment.

See everyone says that but think about it. If you have continuous assessment instead of having one year of stressssss!!!!!>!?!?!?! you will have 5. It will be like the US - you will have to maintain your grades all the way through - because if you don't some other guy will. I'm reminded of the Simpson's scene where Lisa gets a bad grade and is spotted by the Harvard satellite and taken off their potential admissions list or something

The problem isn't really the assessment. Its the lack of places at third level for popular stuff (which in turn may reflect lack of jobs in those sectors). Its also the crazy expectations students and parents have.

The other problem - which is a bigger problem if you ask me - is the gradual slide away from understanding and thinking and problem solving towards rote learning and regurgitation. I actually blame the rise of grind schools for this in the 90's. They killed off what was left of scholarship and completed the transformation into the rat-race it has become.

If you ask me the solution isn't so much continuous assessment in its usually understood form, but perhaps students should be made do projects at various points. Problem solving stuff kind of like the Young Scientists competition. Engage they auld noggin in some sort of real world problem. Maybe one big project in transition year or something.

steddyeddy wrote: »

The fact is universities require a lot more than hard work. A person with a natural aptitude for science is far better to science than someone who just works hard.

Rubbish. Science is all about hard work - the guy/gal dedicated to the cause in the lab til midnight is the guy/gal who gets things done - not the genius who knocks off at five to go drinking.

frozenfrozen wrote: »

Would I be alone in wanting my doctor to have got say 400 points in their leaving cert and had to work through alternative channels to become a doctor, rather than someone who got 600 points and then just did medicine because they could.

I thought they did introduce such altenrative assessment for medicine now and it wasn't jsut about points anymore or did that not go ahead ?

GaryIrv93

mikemac1 wrote: »

But you know about the difficulty of the exams back then

There I was referring to my parents, and certain teachers who did Leaving Certificates who didn't require both grades and points to get into their courses. That's what I meant by their Leaving Certs being ''easier'' - all they needed was the right grades. Hell, it was perfectly acceptable back then to simply leave school after the Junior Cert and start working. My point was that parents and teachers place immense pressure on their kids to achieve both high grades and to get enough points, something that they didn't have to worry about when they did their Leavings over 25 years ago. It's hard for people who left school all those years ago to understand what it's like to be a student nowadays, under huge pressure to be the best of the best and to score higher than they actually need to.

Owen_S

Right now, amongst other things, I have to study Hamlet, a Maeve Binchy novel and the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh, Thomas Kinsella and Sylvia Plath. Then I have to study Irish and French.

All this is required because I want to become an engineer

FloatingVoter

Owen_S wrote: »

Right now, amongst other things, I have to study Hamlet, a Maeve Binchy novel and the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh, Thomas Kinsella and Sylvia Plath. Then I have to study Irish and French.

All this is required because I want to become an engineer

They need engineers in France. You may drop out of college and write romantic fiction in the form of rhyming couplets.
As for the Irish, no idea why you'd need that.

Duggys Housemate

Jester252 wrote: »

I would prefer something like the A-levels in England. Not only would you have a system that gives a high level of education. In the first year of college most for the subjects are to make sure everyone is on the same level as most people would have done bad on the LC in subjects important to their course now because they were spending time doing work for a subject that they are never going to use again outside the LC. While 5th year won't know what they what to do in the future. They will have some sense of what areas they do what to work in.

The A-levels is exactly the model not to follow. In fact England and Wales are the only countries to do something like that. Its too narrow and makes people decide what college courses they want at 16. Its designed for when most students left school at 16 there.

The leaving cert is not a college enterance exam, despite what was said here it was harder when less people went to college, its designed to give a broad education and you can choose to use it for points, or not. I am a scientist now, with good results in English and history in my LC. And glad of it for I continue to read a book a week, often histories. I also did music in the junior cert and I play the piano. Long live a broad education. I notice the "yes" side is winning in the vote but they have no solutions.

Duggys Housemate

Owen_S wrote: »

Right now, amongst other things, I have to study Hamlet, a Maeve Binchy novel and the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh, Thomas Kinsella and Sylvia Plath. Then I have to study Irish and French.

All this is required because I want to become an engineer

It's required because the LC is educating you, not training you.

Duggys Housemate

GaryIrv93 wrote: »

mikemac1 wrote: »

But you know about the difficulty of the exams back then

There I was referring to my parents, and certain teachers who did Leaving Certificates who didn't require both grades and points to get into their courses. That's what I meant by their Leaving Certs being ''easier'' - all they needed was the right grades. Hell, it was perfectly acceptable back then to simply leave school after the Junior Cert and start working. My point was that parents and teachers place immense pressure on their kids to achieve both high grades and to get enough points, something that they didn't have to worry about when they did their Leavings over 25 years ago. It's hard for people who left school all those years ago to understand what it's like to be a student nowadays, under huge pressure to be the best of the best and to score higher than they actually need to.

That's rubbish. The points system existed when I entered secondary school in the 1989 and I am pretty sure it was there a decade. My older siblings had it tougher You are not the first generation to come out into a recession either, and I bet the competition was more intense for the fewer courses available back then and the leaving cert had as many people doing it. Very few people left school for a job with 20% unemployment, lots emigrated. You should look back a decade, not 25 years, for when it was relatively easy.

EDIT: cao founded in 1976, first students used points system in 1978.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Applications_Office#section_2

elefant

There are problems with the leaving cert, but I think the same could be said about state examinations in every country on the planet. For me, the main issue is with the lack of critical thinking that is necessary in exams- memorising is, as everyone has been saying, a major part of many exams. It is also quite stressful having so many exams packed into a short space of time.

However, I think the Leaving Cert is a solid method of evaluation. It might not be perfect, but I can't think of any better, and most importantly ,objective alternatives. The Leaving is the same for everyone, and speaking from my experiences, the smartest students in my year all got the best results in their exams (without any exceptions that I can recall).

If the best students are receiving the best results I don't think much needs changing.

CruelCoin

As an employer, i can confidently say that the education system as it stands is beyond useless in preparing kids for life outside school.

Children are able to memorise by rote huge volumes of material, but lack the critical thinking skills to ever put it into practice.

The system rewards those who get high amounts of points, punishes those who score bably.

I couldn't give a toss if someone with 600 points tried to argue he was better for a job than someone with 200 points. Employers will hire who they feel is best able to perform at a task set to them.


I would suggest a replacement system, that placed more emphasis on individual skills and ranked them accordingly,.

e.g: Clerical speed, mathematical reasoning, logical thinking, spacial reasoning, etc etc. So, i would hire someone for an office job with clerical speed skill of 80 sooner than someone with clerical speed skill of 50, Forklift drivers with spacial reasoning skills of 90 sooner than someone with spacial reasoning of 40, etc etc,.

Long story short, give employers a more usefull way to assess how someone will perform at specific tasks. The current system fails to define that.

Scanlas The 2nd

St.Spodo wrote: »

The main problem with the Leaving Cert is that it doesn't distinguish between learning and memorising. The skills of critical thinking and challenging ideas aren't honed by exams which encourage students to learn by rote, regurgitate and then forget most of it forever by the time they're on holidays. I think the system needs to be significantly altered.

Memorising and regurgitating are hugely important skills too, plenty of subjects teach critical thinking such as maths, physics, tech drawing.

Yalu

The current system clearly isn't ideal, but if I were to highlight a few problems around this "complete overhaul" being suggested it would be these:

1. The current system is completely anonymous. In a country this small, this could be more important than you think. In some countries as I understand it you're basically marked by your teacher. The idea that this could not, at least sometimes, create a conflict of interest beggars belief.

2. All other things being equal (and I realise they're not), the Leaving does reward hard work. Take the hypothetical situation of two students, both of equal ability/aptitude, both from similar backgrounds, having been afforded similar opportunities throughout their childhoods etc etc. The Leaving will reward the one who works over the one who isn't bothered getting off their tod.

3. Continuous assessment is stressful too. As someone mentioned, there will always be people inclined to stress, and people inclined to take it easy. For the ones inclined to stress (and I should know, I'm one of them) continuous assessment just means you're stressing all the time. I do genuinely feel for anyone who falls ill, or has a death in the family or whatever during exams though; at university level this tends to be mitigated by having autumn repeats.

4. Reducing the number of subjects or specialising early isn't necessarily a good idea. Not all schools offer all subjects, and you could actually end up with people even MORE unsuited to the university course going in than at present, simply because that was what their schools specialised in. Also I think it's a pretty big ask of 15/16-year-olds to know what they want to do in university, or indeed for the rest of their career, because that's what this would amount to.

What we have at the moment isn't great. But I think some of the proposals being suggested could overlook some of the things it IS doing right (even if only by accident).

0000879k

I haven't done the LC yet (in third year) and I've barely flicked through this thread but I like the our LC system..
Feel free to call me ''ignorant'' or shout at me or tell me I'm wrong but if every person in the world got an escalator to the top of Mount Everest then reaching the top wouldn't be very special, would it? And the guy who's trained to get there, looks no better than everyone else .. The guy who worked his ass of for two years is rewarded with his results and looks great, while other (jealous) people say it's a ****ed up system.
I don't think there should be continual assessment just because people seem to lose their calenders until the month before the exams.

PhoenixParker

As an engineer I'm extremely glad that I did English for the Leaving.
I actually wish there had been some sort of a writing course in every year in college. Communication is key, and the ability to communicate your thoughts in writing is extremely important. It's a skill that needs to be taught to everyone regardless of their future career plans. It's also a skill you need to practice to maintain. There are far too many excellent engineers out there who are forced to sit and watch poor engineers get promoted above them simply because the poor engineers can get a message across, sell a product or convince someone else to do something.

If you can analyse Hamlet and write a three page essay on it, then you can analyse other difficult texts/problems and explain your thoughts to whoever needs to know.

As for the Leaving Cert being all about rote learning. I found it offered a choice. Learn everything by rote or understand what was happening, learn the key points and write then answer the question on the paper. I went the second way, and tbh it was far easier and far less hard work then trying to memorise five or ten English answers. For all the bad press rote learning gets, if you want to test students understanding, they have to start by actually learning the material in the first place. You won't learn a language without some rote learning of vocabulary, or pass a science exam without rote learning of a few definitions. You certainly can't understand a scientific definition if you haven't learned it off.

As for changing the Leaving Cert. I happen to think it's pretty good. The best part about it are that it is utterly fair. Everyone sits the same exam, rich or poor, connected or not.

It is too focused on a final exam, but I don't think a huge volume of continuous assessment is the answer. I'm utterly opposed to anything that involves teacher grading. I've seen far too many biased teachers over the years. Exams at the end of 5th year worth maybe 30%, an (optional?) project introduced in certain subjects worth 20% and a 50% final exam maybe. There should also be an option for resits in August, but if you resit, it should only be with a doctors certificate, and you don't get your first results at all.

In terms of a larger scale reform, I think moves closer to the International Bac would probably be the way to go. Neither the American System (Too much continuous assessment) or the UK System (far too narrow) are good options.

Monkey61

I'm a big fan of the Leaving personally. It may not be perfect, but I cannot think of a fairer and more objective system for allocating college places. Continuous assessment fails for me because anybody could be doing the work. What's to stop your sister/father/friend etc doing the work for you? Plus, it is easy. Anyone can produce a piece of work to a high standard at home given a huge amount of time. Exams are down to the individual alone.

I also appreciate the sheer breadth of the exposure to learning and information that is inherent in studying 7+ subjects and feel that we get a fairly well rounded education because of it.

I hate the concept of A-Levels, which require choosing what college course you want to aim for much earlier and then being essentially stuck if you haven't picked the right subjects. Living in England at the moment, what I have also noticed is that certain postgrad/doctorate courses and employers actually care about what subjects you did for A-Level, to the extent that I have heard of people with MScs in their chosen field doing A-Level subjects in their spare time just to meet minimum requirements. Frequently I see jobs advertised in certain sectors that don't have a specific degree as a requirement but do request specific A-Level subjects. I'm currently doing a job that asked for an A-Level in a particular subject that bears absolutely no relation to actual ability to do the work. Thus people's subject choices at the age of 16 can have even longer lasting consequences than just acceptance onto a college course.

As a final thought: the idea of college places being allocated based on specific subjects alone rather than points across all subjects is all well and good, but how on earth do you differentiate between the 1000 students who have the same grades in 3 relevant subjects? Interviews and entrance exams would be the only choice but I don't know if I am entirely comfortable with introducing the level of human bias that interviews bring into play at such an early level.

Duggys Housemate

CruelCoin wrote: »

As an employer, i can confidently say that the education system as it stands is beyond useless in preparing kids for life outside school.

Children are able to memorise by rote huge volumes of material, but lack the critical thinking skills to ever put it into practice.

The system rewards those who get high amounts of points, punishes those who score bably.

I couldn't give a toss if someone with 600 points tried to argue he was better for a job than someone with 200 points. Employers will hire who they feel is best able to perform at a task set to them.


I would suggest a replacement system, that placed more emphasis on individual skills and ranked them accordingly,.

e.g: Clerical speed, mathematical reasoning, logical thinking, spacial reasoning, etc etc. So, i would hire someone for an office job with clerical speed skill of 80 sooner than someone with clerical speed skill of 50, Forklift drivers with spacial reasoning skills of 90 sooner than someone with spacial reasoning of 40, etc etc,.

Long story short, give employers a more usefull way to assess how someone will perform at specific tasks. The current system fails to define that.

That's not an education system, it's a trivial vocational system. Spatial awareness my arse. And you don't actually need " critical thinkers" for your forklift company.

MisterEpicurus

I think that instead of having compulsory Irish etc. we should have a compulsive 'Critical Thinking' class. If done effectively, it would involve teaching students how to think rather than 'what to learn'. This is far more valuable a skill than anything learned in college, whether it be in mathematics, business or science. Applying logical thinking to scenarios is the key to conquering them. If students were actually taught this then they may improve their understanding of other subjects they find more difficult. Moreover, as said previously, it's a better skill than anything rote learned in the current Leaving Certificate syllabus.

As for the 'Forklift' people above, they can do LCA or drop-out. Critical thinking should be for those serious about advancing their future studies and prospects rather than retiring in a forklift.

mikemac1

You're just a number

If entry into high demand courses was any other way it would be connections and those in the right schools who get in.

CAO don't care about you, they process you and that's all