From next September every student who has taken the Leaving Certificate will be able to see his or her marked paper before the appeal deadline, the Minister for Education has announced. This will make the Irish exam appeal system one of the most transparent in the English-speaking world.
Mr Martin said yesterday that "for far too long, people have had an impression of a secretive exam system which is not responsive to individual concerns. This has not been helped by the suggestion that mistakes, when they occur, are only reluctantly admitted to".
He said it was crucial to the transparency and integrity of the system that "all students have an effective opportunity to query any result which they think is wrong".
To this end, he would be introducing a radical change in the appeal system. "As of this year's Leaving Certificate examination, we intend to give every candidate an opportunity to see their marked scripts after the issue of provisional results and before the deadline for appeals."
The provisional results will be issued, as usual, in the third week of August. This year, all Leaving Certificate scripts will be returned to the schools when they reopen at the start of September and will be available for inspection by every student, accompanied, if desired, by a parent or other adult.
This will take place under the supervision of at least two superintendents. Students will not be allowed to take pens or other writing instruments in with them, or to remove scripts from the room.
The marks allocated for oral, aural and practical examinations will also be available to students.
To facilitate this procedure, the final date for making an appeal will changed from August 26th last year to September 10th. Arithmetical errors will be dealt with by a new "fast-track rectification" system for which no appeal fee will be charged, the Minister said.
Every year more than 60,000 candidates sit the Leaving Certificate. Including orals, aurals and practicals, projects and written papers, there are 800,000 individual components to the exam. Only the 600,000 written papers will be returned to students for detailed inspection.
Mr Martin said new efficiencies in the Department of Education's appeal procedures would mean that the results of appeals would be issued, as usual, in early October and all Central Applications Office deadlines would be met.
The chief inspector, Mr Eamonn Stack, said that in New Zealand the practice of returning exam scripts to candidates had worked well for up to 10 years. He said after the first year of operation there the number of appeals had decreased substantially.
There were differing reactions from the two secondary teachers' unions to the announcement. The TUI president, Ms Alice Prendergast, welcomed "the greater level of transparency", but urged that adequate resources be provided to facilitate the move and warned against additional burdens on "hard-pressed staff".
Mr Charlie Lennon, general secretary of ASTI, called it "well-intentioned but unworkable" and accused the Minister of making the announcement "in the best traditions of Thatcherite administration, without consulting in advance those likely to be affected by the decision - in this instance those who administer and work in schools".
He said the implementation of the scheme would "cause serious difficulties" at a time when schools are "extremely busy at the beginning of a new school year". He also expressed concern that under new education legislation, school authorities and teachers might risk criminal charges for inadvertent interference in the exam process.