A chara, - With Leaving Cert. students now having the option of looking at their corrected answer papers, the Minister for Education is obviously in the transparency mood.
Could I direct his attention to another area where transparency might be applied? I refer to the silly system of awarding grades in answer papers instead of the exact percentage mark that was in use for many years up to relatively recently. Today a student could gain any one of 14 different grades: A1, A2, B1, B2, B3, C1, C2, C3, D1, D2, D3, E, F and G. The principle seems to be: why make it simple if you can complicate it? Surely it requires no great stretch of the imagination to see that giving the candidate the precise percentage he scored in any paper is the simple and transparent way of doing things.
No student is going to suffer psychological trauma because he or she gets a percentage mark instead of a grade and I feel sure, too, that the fine body of men and women who make up the ASTI would be all in favour. - Is mise, Eadaoin Ni Chuill,
Bothar Ath Luain,
An Muileann Cearr.