Leaving Cert 2022 and whingeing students

Predicted grades are an easy option for students that simply do not want to sit the exam, knowing that Predicted grades will give them a higher grade than if the exam was taken.

What about the LC's that actually want to take the exam?

Knowing that they may not get their place in college if points increase as dramatically as last year, and increase they will if grades are once again predicted. The leaving cert is not perfect, but by sitting a written exam it is comparing apples with apples, every one being graded equally, instead of the utter madness of grade inflation.

I don’t know if you are aware, last year the students could opt to sit the leaving cert. Higher grades with predicted grading is actually of little benefit to students if everyone else is getting them, students understand that, unfortunately not everyone else does.

Students sitting the exams this year is not “comparing apples with apples”, there will be a significant number of students with inflated grades from the last two years applying for courses beginning in September 2022, in competition with those who sit the exams with no predicted grades this year. Many LC students, including my own son, are finishing their mocks tomorrow with a considerable part of the LC syllables still not yet covered by their teachers due to teacher illness/absence associated with Covid.

Schools/students will also have to consider that there is a real risk of some students not being able to sit exams due to Covid, they may not have symptoms severe enough to prevent them physically sitting the exam, but may well be excluded from doing so by Government guidelines.

So let’s not assume that this is students not wanting to sit exams, they should be given the fairest opportunity possible given the circumstances. Remember, a significant percentage of workers either don’t feel safe to return to offices, or don’t want to, but people like yourself think students should shut up and put up with sitting the exams that decide whether they can follow the academic path they studied for, less well prepared and more at risk of being unable to sit them.

Mocks are sat every year with the course incomplete in many subjects/schools. That's not unusual. Ironically this is the first year my students have the course finished before the mocks.

A second date for sitting of the original date of LC has already been taken in to account asfar as I know.

Many students and parents are entirely unaware of how the points system works and the knock on effect of predicted grades.

Not sure what the relationship between sitting exams and returning to work is?

The fairest thing for students is categorically not a hybrid LC.

I wouldn't worry about it for the mocks. Some schools don't do them at all. Plenty of time to make it up between this and the LC. Less of the course to be covered in many subjects and more choice to be offered again.

Not every job in the country requires a masters from UCD to perform it.

No, but if your employees are required to have any post secondary qualifications to work for you, the students will have to have passed those exams before being employed, I’m not talking about masters from UCD, I’m talking about any qualifications gained after the LC. Will you be asking them if the sat the LC before getting those qualifications?

If your employees aren’t required to have qualifications, what difference does it make if they sat the LC?

It is difficult for me to understand your logic, it seems a unique viewpoint to refuse to employ two years of students who didn’t sit the LC due to Covid.

So you will not hire students who haven’t sat the LC to work on your assembly line, working in a shop, in your deli etc? Did all your current employees in those positions achieve the required points in their LC to do those jobs?

Some trades people never sat a LC, but are qualified electricians, plumbers, carpenters etc, would you refuse to employ one of them?

“Go up to your room and get back to work”, touts, what industry do you work in?

The irony may be lost on you touts, the kids that knuckle down, work hard, get good LC results, don’t usually aspire to work for you in jobs where the only requirement is to work hard and shut up. Academic achievement is not a reliable metric for hard manual or menial work, or for being a snowflake. If you are using LC results to assess that, no doubt it is costing you money.

Not according to Paul Murphy on RTE radio this evening, he wants the whole country doing a year in University for free, any course you like.

Rich Boy Barrett was on the radio yesterday saying the same thing. Free university place for everyone in any course they want. Yes we could do with more people in certain courses. We need more Doctors and Dentists for example. But abolishing the leaving cert and letting everyone go straight into any college course they want would be chaos. 50,000 into medicine in UCD. They would have to hold lectures in Croke Park.

How did those with inflated grades perform in third level relative to pre-Covid LCs?

I have some sympathy for the LC kids in all this. To be fair, they are 17-18 years old with no real world experience and have spent nearly 1/8 of their existence in some class of lockdown. It was inevitable that they would call for no formal exam (we all would have chanced our arm the same at that age).

Despite its unpopularity with the LC cohort, the decision taken offers the fairest means of awarding grades. Last years free-for-all proves that. I would be in favour of a correctly structured CA model for elements of some JC and LC courses, with a final exam included. But to think that is going to be delivered in the time-frame of June 2022 is fanciful at best.

The fault for the hysteria around this good decision lies squarely with opportunist, populist commentators and politicians who have taken an unprincipled and impractical position solely to harvest votes from the first time voter demographic at the next election. O'Riordain, McDonald, O'Laoighre, Murphy and Boyd Barrett have whipped up the expectation of another giveaway for their own self-interest, and have fuelled the anxiety and uncertainty that they so falsely decry. Shameful, shameful sh&t.