As regular readers will know, my wife is a teacher. Before I met her, and came to know as many teachers as I now do, I confess to having held to a lot of stereotypes about her profession: Long holidays, short hours, timing-the-babies-for-September-to-max-out-maternity-leave, that sort of thing.
But last week, as her mountain of thank you cards from departing students piled up on our window, and I watched her answering emails from students with final pre-exam questions well into the evening, I was reminded that for many teachers, and probably most of them, it really is a vocation. There aren’t many jobs where you get to literally watch the next generation becoming adults, and help shape them into who they become. She and her colleagues meet young people at the age of 12 or 13, and bid them farewell at 17 or 18. Those are perhaps the most formative years of a young person’s life. Most reasonably successful people I know can cite that one teacher who made an enormous difference to them. In my own secondary school, St. Macartan’s College in Monaghan, there were two in particular to whom I owe an eternal debt: Mr. Paddy Duffy and (the sadly late, far too early) Mrs. Geraldine Garvey.
Anyway, those departing students of my wife’s now face into two weeks of exams which will – they and we are told – play an outsized role in determining the future course of their lives. University and College places will be allocated to them based on nothing more than pure academic performance, with points cut-off on a supply and demand basis being what decides whether they pursue their desired career, or some other.
I have written in previous years that the Irish system for allocating college places is fair. And it is: Ruthlessly fair. There is no way to game the system. You either get the points, or you do not.
But it is also arbitrary. The year I entered third level, the points for the course I took were 485. I made it in. I would also have made it in the following year, when the points were 465 – but there were people who missed out on the course in my year who would have gotten in had they gotten the exact same result a year later.
What’s more, having gotten my first choice course, I was one of those people who discovered it didn’t suit me at all. I stuck with it, but emerged four years later without much enthusiasm for a career in my chosen field. It turns out that to be a top economist, you need to be a whole lot better at maths than I am. It is almost certain that I spent four years in a fully-paid-for College berth that would have been much more suitable for somebody who got 480 points, and missed out through the vagaries of the points system.
This brings me to the leaving cert itself. It strikes me as the kind of system that when you first think about it, appears to make sense, but makes less and less sense the more you really consider it.
For example, there are young people out there who, over the next few weeks, will sit a leaving cert exam in history, hoping for a H1 (the old A1) so that they can go to University and study molecular biology. Without wishing to stir political controversy, there are many tens of thousands of young people who will sit exams in the Irish language, and then will barely ever speak it again. All of this is about compiling points, so that they can access the course they really want to do.
There is a difference between a system that is fair, and a system that delivers the best outcomes. In my own case, the best outcome would probably have been somebody in Trinity taking a look at my mathematics result in the leaving cert (it was a D3 at higher level) and saying “eh John, econometrics is not for you, buddy. Try philosophy or history”. I am not saying I was without my own share of the blame here – but at eighteen I think you can be excused some foolishness. If I’m honest, career guidance at second level could have been better, as well.
Anyway, this is not how they do it in other jurisdictions. Apply to Oxford or Cambridge and other top UK Universities, for example, and they will actually interview you to see if you are remotely suitable for the course you are applying for. In the US system, for all its many flaws, you are rarely locked into a final degree course until late in the undergraduate program. In addition, their tests for admission include cognitive testing like SAT and ACT examinations, which measure cognitive ability and talent as much as they measure proficiency in subjects. The focus elsewhere in short is about making sure that the right people do the right courses, rather than basic fairness in admissions.
I am not suggesting here that the leaving cert be abolished: It is a right of passage for people and it is also worthwhile to establish proficiency at that age in subjects that society considers important.
What I am suggesting, however, is that the current system is not efficiently allocating students the way it might, and that it is a very arbitrary way of matching young people to fields that meet their talents.
Nevertheless, this morning is the culmination of six years of hard work by students and teachers across the country. There will be parents everywhere with candles lit. There will be teachers scrutinising exam papers for fairness. There will, at the end of it all, be deserved partying. To all those sitting the exams today, and all of those who have so diligently prepared them for it, we at Gript say a hearty good luck.
But I think there’s a better and less stressful system available to us, if we thought about it a bit more.