MANY second level students are leaving school without basic writing skills, according to a Department of Education report on the 1995 Leaving Certificate examinations published yesterday. The report, by the Department's English examiners, concludes that even very bright students may be unable to write grammatically correct sentences.
"Many students even very good ones, judging from their ideas and familiarity with texts can no longer write grammatically," the report on the higher level English paper complains. "Their writing is frequently illogical, muddled and at times incomprehensible. Yet they appear to think they are making sense."
The report comes one week before the publication of this year's Leaving Certificate results, which will be available from schools next Thursday. The report is one of 14 published yesterday on a range of Leaving Certificate subjects, from mathematics to classical studies, but the English report is the most critical in its findings.
"It is quite obvious from a reading of their scripts that many intelligent and able students are handicapped by a lack of writing skills," the examiners say of last year's higher level English students.
Overall, the report reveals that while the percentage of higher level students achieving A grades increased by almost 1 per cent, the percentage of students achieving an E grade or lower almost doubled to over 5 per cent. At ordinary level, the report also notes a growing number of candidates in the lower grade categories whose performance gives "cause for concern". The examiners report that "in the case of these candidates, basic literacy skills were lacking".
Mr Sean Mitchell, president of the National Parents' Council (Post Primary), commented. "If the examiner's report is saying they are concerned about the level of literacy, then we would be concerned as well. The whole system is points driven, and maybe literacy is losing out." He expressed the hope that the proposed new Leaving Certificate English syllabus would address the literacy problem among students.
The English examiners' report also contains some prime examples of student errors. In Philadelphia, Here I Come, Madge is apparently a "housekipper", Gar's mother died two months after he was conceived, and Gar himself is, perhaps unexpectedly, a "clone". Shakespeare, meanwhile, would have been surprised to learn that Lady Macbeth invited Duncan to a "sleep over" and that, without her malign influence, "Duncan could be alive today".
Elsewhere, the mathematics report shows that the number of students taking higher level maths has increased by 60 per cent since the new syllabus was introduced in 1994 and the number of female candidates has increased to 42.5 per cent in two years.
In Irish, the number of candidates achieving grade C or higher also increased slightly in 1995 but the examiners expressed concern at the number of ordinary level candidates who answered the second paper poorly or did not sit the paper at all. Some 24 per cent of ordinary level candidates failed the Irish paper.