What can be done to get boys to do as well as girls in their Leaving Certs, asks John Downes.
It is easy to understand why today's figures on the performance of girls and boys in the Leaving Certificate give cause for alarm.
The figures illustrate a significant development - when it comes to languages such as French and German, girls seem to be pulling ahead of their male counterparts.
But in truth, the State Examinations Commission statistics mainly underline what is by now a well-established trend: girls consistently outperform boys in most, if not all, of the major higher-level Leaving Certificate subjects.
The situation at ordinary level is not much better. Again, boys have higher failure rates in the majority of subjects and are consistently struggling to pass exams in areas such as maths and the sciences.
At a time when the existence of a "laddish culture" among boys is frequently highlighted, this leads to the understandable question: why are girls outperforming boys? And what can and should be done to encourage boys to perform better?
Putting a finger on the answers to both of these questions is no easy task.
Some education experts maintain that girls tend to work more consistently and from an earlier age. By comparison, boys tend to be less mature and are more likely to engage in short "fits and bursts" of study.
Although "cramming" can work for some students, leaving things to the last moment means they may be increasing the risk of performing poorly on the day of the exam itself.
This is particularly true of an exam which places so much emphasis on the recall of facts and figures and on predicting what comes up.
In this context, the much-heralded reforms of the Leaving Certificate currently envisaged by Minister for Education Mary Hanafin might go some way to addressing this situation. Involving the introduction of a two-stage exam, this could take some of the emphasis off an individual's performance in a single terminal exam.
Others approach the issue from a different perspective. Instead of automatically changing an exam system to accommodate the needs of boys, we should be looking at what it is that girls do right, in order to encourage boys to emulate them, they point out.
For their part, business leaders also underline that any situation where girls are regularly obtaining higher grades could in fact have positive repercussions.
If girls are consistently achieving higher points, it could eventually lead to a breaking of the glass ceiling whereby males tend to occupy the majority of senior management positions.
But others take a different line.
While any change should not affect the ability of girls to perform well in exams, if one significant group in society is failing to achieve its full potential, then society has a duty to do something about this.
What the answer is remains to be seen, but one thing seems certain: the debate over the performance of boys and girls in the Leaving Certificate exam seems set to rage on.