If you did not know that the leaving certificate exams in Ireland start today, then one could only assume that you are either blind and deaf, or arrived this morning on an interstellar ferry from the far end of the galaxy. Exam season has become, over the past twenty years, one of the fixtures on the Irish media calendar, where various articles can be written months in advance, saying roughly the same thing every year. It’s like “international woman’s day”, but with slightly less preaching.
The Irish education system, in all honesty, is one of those things in the country that actually works reasonably well: Whatever your level of income, third level education is affordable and accessible, if it is something you want to do and if you have a basic level of ability. It’s one of the reasons our student movement talks about almost everything except education: They can spend the time they do campaigning on things like transgenderism and climate change precisely because there’s not much need for a student campaign group to do a whole lot of work on education.
Our system of allocating college places couldn’t really be fairer, either: It’s basic supply and demand. The points required for various courses are set by the demand for places on them, and the points you need to get in are just the cutoff point after all the places on that course have been filled.
And yet I wonder.
There are not many societies, based on my observation of the news, in which the equivalent exam to the leaving cert is treated every year as a potentially life-defining trial of wit, endurance, and moral fibre. There is not, for example, a massive amount of time devoted in the British or American press to the production of survival guides for the A levels, or achieving a decent GPA, respectively.
Our system is relatively unusual in two respects: First, it is unusual in that it asks young people to commit to a particular career course exceptionally early in life. Adulthood is defined as being 18 years old – and yet many leaving cert students are filling out CAO forms, deciding what they want to do for the rest of their lives, at just 17. This is an enormous demand to place on people with very little real world experience of work, and who are in many cases only partly through the journey of discovering their own talents.
The system also dislocates talent from the appeal of a career: I suspect, for example, that there are a reasonable number of CAO forms in circulation that rank medicine as a first choice, and law as a second choice. Those two careers could not be more different, or requiring of entirely different skillsets. We ask people to commit to one of them, in many cases, before they have achieved any basic grounding in any of the other necessary skills for either career. We’re spending gobs of money training doctors and lawyers who may not be suited to the job at all.
The other way in which the system is unusual is the way the college admissions system takes so little about the person into account. The system is fair, because everybody is just a number, with a level of points beside it. And yet the system is unfair, because everybody is just a number, with a level of points beside it. Outside of some specific access programmes to address disadvantage, the college admissions system is basically prohibited from making any assessment of an applicant’s suitability for a course.
This is in contrast to the UK, for example, where interviews are often conducted with potential applicants ahead of time, to assess their suitability and give the applicant a flavour of what is expected.
All of this adds up to a system that makes the next two weeks the be-all and end-all for many of our young people. Many people sitting the leaving cert this week are simply not suited to academic life, and would be better off working (and earning gobs of money) in trades and skills that are apprenticeship based. Some of them are very talented, but may fail an exam through nerves or simply having a bad day, and miss out on their potential. Many others will work their tails off and succeed, and still end up in a career that ultimately makes them unhappy.
All of it adds up to the big media event, and the survival guides, and the what to do if you didn’t get your course pieces that will emerge in August.
There’s much to like about our system. But I’m not sure that’s enough to keep it as it is.