There’s no denying it: the data shows it’s been an exceptional year for Leaving Cert results. The number of H1 grades increased by between 120 and 160 per cent in key subjects compared to pre-pandemic years. Many students and parents are glowing.
Much of the debate has focused on questions around grade inflation. We must resist knee-jerk reactions that assume something is amiss. Experts argue that assessment changes or an increase in student performance are just as likely to be behind such a strong set of results, rather than anything untoward.
I think the real story begins long before results day. What if the conditions created by the pandemic were ideally suited to success under the current assessment system?
Over the last 18 months, students have endured a narrow academic experience based on isolation and devoid of any social and cultural “frills”. They’ve missed out on many aspects of normal life: not allowed to meet friends or develop new relationships, not allowed to take part-time work, not allowed to travel or participate in sports or the arts, not allowed to demonstrate about the things they feel passionately about (remember the school strikes of 2019?), not allowed any other interests or social life beyond their home.
We have assumed that sitting in a classroom with a teacher is the only way young people source information and learn. It isn't
So should we be surprised they have succeeded in an assessment system that primarily places value on the rote learning of vast quantities of information.
Perhaps they have not succeeded in spite of the pandemic, but because of it.
If that is the case, we should be examining all our assumptions about educational experience. All too often older generations extrapolate based on their own experiences, rather than the realities of education in 2021.
Avenues of learning
We have assumed that sitting in a classroom with a teacher is the only way young people source information and learn. It isn’t. I’ve been struck for a number of years how incoming first years at UCD have taken online courses, sometimes at top US universities, before they come to us.
We have assumed that because schools have been closed, all education must have suffered. This may not be the case for well-resourced, digital-savvy students in the 16-19 age group.
Finally, we have assumed that because young people’s overall development has likely suffered due to the pandemic, there should have been a knock-on effect on their exam results. But the Leaving Cert does not take into account overall development. On the contrary, it measures the ability to focus on academic study to the exclusion of all else. Pandemic restrictions have been a grind schools’ dream!
Higher education institutions now need to figure out how to unravel these results.
We face the unsettling prospect that, as more students achieve the highest possible grades, the only way we have of selecting them for professions like medicine and law is by random allocation. We are moving even further away, it seems, from taking into account 21st-century skills in professions that need them badly.
Climate crisis
Singapore was facing a similar issue when I visited there in 2016. Many, too many, students were achieving maximum grades and parents were rethinking how to help their children win a place at a top international university. Top grades were a given but launching a successful start-up was what really might set their children apart from other applicants; could the UCD Innovation Academy help, they asked.
We have 10 years to completely transform the way we live to a sustainable alternative or be the generation that witnesses the dramatic reduction of life on Earth
Is the Leaving Cert and the associated points race really what we want for our young people? Is this what we need for our society? As the world battles with a worsening climate crisis and we hurtle towards the point of no return, perhaps we might prefer an assessment system which also considers and values creativity, innovation, empathy, collaboration and teamwork, social and cultural awareness, engagement with the community and the ability to solve unanticipated problems with ingenious solutions. Students with these attributes are the ones who will benefit most from all that higher education has to offer and who will contribute to a better future for all.
We have 10 years to completely transform the way we live to a sustainable alternative or be the generation that witnesses the dramatic reduction of life on Earth. Ten years from now, do we want to see Leaving Cert students, from all parts of society, celebrated for their potential to contribute to the positive change our planet so desperately needs?
Or is our learning from the pandemic that we should isolate our young people in air-conditioned, flood-proof pods where they can focus on their studies – achieving eight H1s in exam utopia while the rest of the world, quite literally, burns?