Alison O' Connor: Time to question our ludicrous obsession with the Leaving Cert

Of all the things I will be missing next week, the intricate details of what was contained in the first few Leaving Certificate examination papers will not be one of them, writes Alison O'Connor

I won’t miss discussions along the lines of the students’ relief that poet Sylvia Plath appeared on the higher English paper and that Seamus Heaney did not, or the perceived unfairness of the ordinary level maths paper. 

A serious look at the lunacy that surrounds our national school-leaving qualification examination is long overdue. The pity is that it took our current circumstances to force that.

Do you ever, listening to the radio, or reading some of the many, many column inches in newspapers, or online, devoted during exam season to the minute details of the Leaving Certificate papers, question the ludicrousness of this national obsession?

Why should anyone without a child sitting the exam that day have even a passing knowledge of what the questions were, let alone the absence of a question on one author or another, or how chemistry students were left devastated by the toughness of their paper?

Devastated is no understatement, either. The system is structured so that an individual student’s performance on the day, or over a series of days, actually, is crucial. 

Why, as a society, do we feel the need to treat our young people with such cruelty, especially considering the lip service paid to the importance of their mental health?

Hard-fought changes were finally introduced at the lower level: The new Junior Cycle, with its classroom assessments (remember how long that took to organise, teachers resisting tooth and nail?) is a far better proposition.

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Will this year’s first-year students, who will be the first to complete the entire Junior Cycle exams, have to turn around in fifth year and shoehorn their thinking back into the old way of doing things with the Leaving Certificate?

What is the need to make this exam so tough and stressful for our young people, a ‘path of fire’ rite of passage?

 An industry has been built around the Leaving Certificate, not least on the part of the media, and that’s even before we get into the toxic nonsense that surrounds the CAO. 

It is a laudable aspiration for anyone to wish their child to get to third-level education, but the Irish middle-class obsession with it is completely out of hand.

It would be a social death of sorts to ‘admit’ that your own darling was aiming for an apprenticeship, so it’s considered preferable for them to do a college course at which they might be absolutely miserable. 

How many square pegs have found themselves in academic round holes because of parental and societal expectations?

One in every 15 adults in Ireland studies at a university, institute, or college, according to data from the Higher Education Authority. 

So, 250,000 people studied at a third-level course in 2018, putting us top of the class in the EU in terms of proportion of school-leavers progressing to higher education. It is certainly positive that apprenticeships have doubled in recent years, with 17,500 young people opting for them.

Parental Leaving Certificate chat is far more likely to centre around the best place to go for grinds. 

It is an extraordinarily rare thing nowadays to hear of a middle-class child who did not get a grind in some Leaving Certificate subject or other.

I’m glad to say we’re a number of years away from the Leaving Certificate stress in my house, but I’ve watched as friends, who I would see as wise parents to be emulated, almost buckled under the exam stress. 

The stress wasn’t emanating from the interactions they were having with their children; they weren’t pushing them relentlessly on the need to exceed themselves in the exam. 

Rather, they were doing their absolute best to show no stress at all, attempting to protect their offspring from the all-pervasive pressure, whether from peers or the media, while serving the best, most nourishing food ever to be seen in their homes before or since. 

Bonkers hardly goes far enough to describe it.

I’ve always felt pity for the teenagers sitting this blasted exam, but never more so than for this year’s Leaving Certificate class, around 57,000 of them. 

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They had all this pressure going on anyway, as they made their way through secondary school and into sixth year, and then along comes a pandemic.

That national obsession of ours meant that it was never going to be easy to sort out this year’s Leaving Certificate dilemma to everyone’s satisfaction.

But as it progressed, it came across as a form of pure torture for the children involved. 

I’ve heard it said, during all the tormented consideration of the different options, that the difficulties involved were proof that the Leaving Certificate was indeed a very good exam.

This logic could be presented as torture in its own right, given that it was the hype and obsession, and the structure of the exams, that made it such a problem to restructure with any degree of speed or agreement.

Then, when it looked like it was all finally sorted and students were regaining some sense of equilibrium, the Association of Secondary Teachers’ Ireland (ASTI) popped up last week, publicly airing their concerns over legal protection for teachers involved in the predictive grading process. 

It is worth pointing out that the Teachers’ Union of Ireland were quite happy with the legal protections.

After agreement was reached, ASTI president, Deirdre McDonald, on RTÉ’s Drivetime radio show, said it was always her view that “this would be resolved quickly”, and there was “never any need for students to be stressed” over the issue.

Frankly, having been through what they already had, and believing it to be finally sorted at that point, only a Leaving Certificate student who had fallen into a coma in the meantime would have been able to avoid further stress.

As the story that just keeps on giving, the latest roller-coaster instalment was that teachers were being advised to destroy any documents they used when coming to a decision on a grade for a student. 

All that will remain, in the end, is the final form submitted to the Department of Education.

Anyone who wants to appeal a grade will be offered a check on data entry to ensure there were no errors, and that, as far as the long-suffering students are concerned, will be that.

If nothing else, the legacy of the class of 2020 should be a commitment to an overhaul of this ridiculous examination system, which, in the absence of any global virus, we would have been worn out from hearing about from next Wednesday, which was to have been the first day of the Leaving Certificate.

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