Colleges want to keep their courses points requirements high.
They’ve kicked the can in a way – now every leaving cert year until they pull back grade inflation are going to be crying about how unfair it all is.
I still can’t get over the amount of students on the radio who didn’t want to do exams and wanted to rely on the accredited grades.
Imagine going off to college never having properly studied for an exam. They’re adding a huge amount of choice now it seems so it’ll be watered down for them but at least it gives that experience.
And that’s before you have Paul Murphy saying everyone should get into college without any kind of leaving cert – if everyone wants to be a doctor have a common first year of science for them he says – a thoroughbred spoofer. Pandering by some members of opposition on this has been crazy. 🙄
So many courses are now over 600 points. How do you even attain more than the absolute LC maximum of 600 points?
The students sitting the exams should not be dictating how these exams are run and how grades are calculated. The leaving cert is difficult, it is supposed to be.
It did seem far to sensible for Norma to just revert back to the pre covid LC
What difference does it make? If everyone’s points are going up then the same people are probably still getting these courses. The points for a course aren’t the minimum requirement, they’re just what the person who got in with the lowest points got.
So much crying about this as if this years lc students are the first ones to sit the exam.. of course they would love accredited grades when the teacher can give them the highest grades just because ‘the teacher liked them’ and they would achieve maximum points … the exams will probs be made as easy as possible for students to get high grades
Ultimately this shouldn’t be a huge deal. Most people have a vague idea of what they’re interested in, and what they’re capable of. You’re not going to have someone who can’t read do law, or doesn’t understand biology thinking they’re going to study medicine. You’re not going to get many people who know they hate maths deciding they want to do maths science.
Much of first year, in science, engineering, maths or language subjects, is about revising and ensuring everyone gets to a common standard. Unless they’ve literally no idea what algebra is, or whatever, or they hate the subject, they’ll be grand.
Many courses already have fairly high drop out rates. Maybe that’ll go up a bit for a year or 2. In the context of a global pandemic this is not at all a serious problem.
The leaving cert is a great program. Universities NEED a filtering process for applicants, not everybody can be a doctor or engineer. I live in France, and work at university level, where they don’t have a points system for their leaving (the BAC) or any form of filtration for applicants. Anybody can apply for anything. The catch is that some of the harder courses (medicine, where I work for example) have a competitive exam after the first year, where the filtering process happens. However it WORKS in France. For 2 main reasons, the ridiculous amount of very large universities AND the (basically) free cost of education (a years tuition is like 50-100 euro). We don’t have the infrastructure in Ireland for that. There aren’t enough spaces in competitive courses, and it’s not like you can just try a year of medical school for the heck of it because it’s set you back a couper of grand. Without the filtering points process of the leaving cert, you’re going to have a lot of students applying for positions they aren’t capable for, denying more capable students, and then dropping out, losing the funds and motivation to start off again in another, more suitable course. Ireland has one of the highest levels of education in the world (despite that being slightly at fault, and prompting people into uni as the false be-all-and-end-all solution) and a big part of that is with a competitive secondary school exam. It’s tough on the students, but it’s the best system I know of.
I’ve seen a lot of academic staff complaining that this year’s 1st years just aren’t able and there’s gonna be a massive fail rate. College’s are now discussing having entrance exams to help pick the actual deserving high point students out of the mix.
College is already a huge learning curve, secondary school doesn’t really prepare you. Now they’re being spoon fed even more in secondary so it’s no wonder they’ll struggle.
[deleted]
So bloody stupid. The grades of 2021 students should be “deflated” more in line with 2019 grades.
They’ve dug themselves into a massive hole and now they’ve to figure out how to climb back out of it. Leaving it up to individual teachers to decide their own students grades was next level retarded and now they’re paying the price for what an absolute joke of a decision they made. Students could go to class but all of a sudden couldn’t sit in an exam hall or sit an exam at all because they missed a few weeks in class lol good luck to them in 3rd level where you have to do your own study a lot of the time and don’t have a teacher designating you homework.
I think it’s very easy for people here to complain but like, this isn’t your life, this actually impacts a large amount of people potentially for life
In my opinion, studying subjects I have no complete interest in during school really hurt how I perceived classes
I like maths to an extent enjoy the teacher and class and in such do pretty good in it, my English teacher I hate, always fights with me and is picky, dread going into class and such don’t do as well in class
Politics, new course, lack of subject knowledge for past papers and our teacher although a joy to go into class for, doesn’t tell us course material to well and is severely confusing on what’s on the paper (she did give us exam papers for which were not for sale which is what I’m using, and isn’t much since it’s a bee course so lack of material but better than nothing)
And keep in mind this is in a school in which little bad student to student happen, nobody bullies eachother nobody is really hurting one another in school, somebody who goes to another school I know left school because she was harassed on a daily basis by both some teachers and students, school did little to nothing and lacked care and she suffered greatly in school and now has left in 5th year, you might say just to do it and live through it but would you continue to work at a workplace for 7/8 hours a day with commuting and work after at home to be harassed by employer and employees on a daily based without being payed? No you would leave ASAP.
The leaving Cert isn’t for everybody, not for my friend and not for me (I cannot do wrote learning and find it completely insufferable to even enjoy and therefore ‘learn’
College is in a different nutshell but I’d be doing something I thoroughly enjoy and *WANT* to learn along with it being mostly physical learning rather than on paper learning which is what I excel at, my school has a lot of infrastructure for physical learning like woodwork technology art music computer science etc
So saying people will just flake any course they get into because it’s easier is a complete lie and depends on person in mind, subject in mind, and their want to actually DO the subject and love it. If you don’t like your course you won’t do as well as people who arnt as good in said course but do love it as it might be their perceived passion
If the department folds like a deck chair and let’s this madness happen, the colleges will just start setting their own entrance exams. It would be interesting to see failure and drop out rates for the past two years if the colleges are to be believed that the standard of student has fallen since we’ve allowed teachers to set their grade.
I mean the idea is that marking schemes are going to be geared so that grades will be inflated to match last years inflation, which means someone will take the fall but it wont be us, its better than a hybrid LC tbh.
The best solution is probably to not inflate grades this year and have the colleges set entrance exams for anyone entering based on last year’s points.
To give some idea of how piss this leaving cert is for my accounting exam I will know exactly what is coming up on the paper before sitting it. I only have to study three types of questions with a few variants to get a H1
Lots of bitter boomers in this comment section hating on students. Ireland is no country for young people.
Making the exams easier = inflated grades?? NO WAY
21 comments
Colleges want to keep their courses points requirements high.
They’ve kicked the can in a way – now every leaving cert year until they pull back grade inflation are going to be crying about how unfair it all is.
I still can’t get over the amount of students on the radio who didn’t want to do exams and wanted to rely on the accredited grades.
Imagine going off to college never having properly studied for an exam. They’re adding a huge amount of choice now it seems so it’ll be watered down for them but at least it gives that experience.
And that’s before you have Paul Murphy saying everyone should get into college without any kind of leaving cert – if everyone wants to be a doctor have a common first year of science for them he says – a thoroughbred spoofer. Pandering by some members of opposition on this has been crazy. 🙄
So many courses are now over 600 points. How do you even attain more than the absolute LC maximum of 600 points?
The students sitting the exams should not be dictating how these exams are run and how grades are calculated. The leaving cert is difficult, it is supposed to be.
It did seem far to sensible for Norma to just revert back to the pre covid LC
What difference does it make? If everyone’s points are going up then the same people are probably still getting these courses. The points for a course aren’t the minimum requirement, they’re just what the person who got in with the lowest points got.
So much crying about this as if this years lc students are the first ones to sit the exam.. of course they would love accredited grades when the teacher can give them the highest grades just because ‘the teacher liked them’ and they would achieve maximum points … the exams will probs be made as easy as possible for students to get high grades
Ultimately this shouldn’t be a huge deal. Most people have a vague idea of what they’re interested in, and what they’re capable of. You’re not going to have someone who can’t read do law, or doesn’t understand biology thinking they’re going to study medicine. You’re not going to get many people who know they hate maths deciding they want to do maths science.
Much of first year, in science, engineering, maths or language subjects, is about revising and ensuring everyone gets to a common standard. Unless they’ve literally no idea what algebra is, or whatever, or they hate the subject, they’ll be grand.
Many courses already have fairly high drop out rates. Maybe that’ll go up a bit for a year or 2. In the context of a global pandemic this is not at all a serious problem.
The leaving cert is a great program. Universities NEED a filtering process for applicants, not everybody can be a doctor or engineer. I live in France, and work at university level, where they don’t have a points system for their leaving (the BAC) or any form of filtration for applicants. Anybody can apply for anything. The catch is that some of the harder courses (medicine, where I work for example) have a competitive exam after the first year, where the filtering process happens. However it WORKS in France. For 2 main reasons, the ridiculous amount of very large universities AND the (basically) free cost of education (a years tuition is like 50-100 euro). We don’t have the infrastructure in Ireland for that. There aren’t enough spaces in competitive courses, and it’s not like you can just try a year of medical school for the heck of it because it’s set you back a couper of grand. Without the filtering points process of the leaving cert, you’re going to have a lot of students applying for positions they aren’t capable for, denying more capable students, and then dropping out, losing the funds and motivation to start off again in another, more suitable course. Ireland has one of the highest levels of education in the world (despite that being slightly at fault, and prompting people into uni as the false be-all-and-end-all solution) and a big part of that is with a competitive secondary school exam. It’s tough on the students, but it’s the best system I know of.
I’ve seen a lot of academic staff complaining that this year’s 1st years just aren’t able and there’s gonna be a massive fail rate. College’s are now discussing having entrance exams to help pick the actual deserving high point students out of the mix.
College is already a huge learning curve, secondary school doesn’t really prepare you. Now they’re being spoon fed even more in secondary so it’s no wonder they’ll struggle.
[deleted]
So bloody stupid. The grades of 2021 students should be “deflated” more in line with 2019 grades.
They’ve dug themselves into a massive hole and now they’ve to figure out how to climb back out of it. Leaving it up to individual teachers to decide their own students grades was next level retarded and now they’re paying the price for what an absolute joke of a decision they made. Students could go to class but all of a sudden couldn’t sit in an exam hall or sit an exam at all because they missed a few weeks in class lol good luck to them in 3rd level where you have to do your own study a lot of the time and don’t have a teacher designating you homework.
I think it’s very easy for people here to complain but like, this isn’t your life, this actually impacts a large amount of people potentially for life
In my opinion, studying subjects I have no complete interest in during school really hurt how I perceived classes
I like maths to an extent enjoy the teacher and class and in such do pretty good in it, my English teacher I hate, always fights with me and is picky, dread going into class and such don’t do as well in class
Politics, new course, lack of subject knowledge for past papers and our teacher although a joy to go into class for, doesn’t tell us course material to well and is severely confusing on what’s on the paper (she did give us exam papers for which were not for sale which is what I’m using, and isn’t much since it’s a bee course so lack of material but better than nothing)
And keep in mind this is in a school in which little bad student to student happen, nobody bullies eachother nobody is really hurting one another in school, somebody who goes to another school I know left school because she was harassed on a daily basis by both some teachers and students, school did little to nothing and lacked care and she suffered greatly in school and now has left in 5th year, you might say just to do it and live through it but would you continue to work at a workplace for 7/8 hours a day with commuting and work after at home to be harassed by employer and employees on a daily based without being payed? No you would leave ASAP.
The leaving Cert isn’t for everybody, not for my friend and not for me (I cannot do wrote learning and find it completely insufferable to even enjoy and therefore ‘learn’
College is in a different nutshell but I’d be doing something I thoroughly enjoy and *WANT* to learn along with it being mostly physical learning rather than on paper learning which is what I excel at, my school has a lot of infrastructure for physical learning like woodwork technology art music computer science etc
So saying people will just flake any course they get into because it’s easier is a complete lie and depends on person in mind, subject in mind, and their want to actually DO the subject and love it. If you don’t like your course you won’t do as well as people who arnt as good in said course but do love it as it might be their perceived passion
If the department folds like a deck chair and let’s this madness happen, the colleges will just start setting their own entrance exams. It would be interesting to see failure and drop out rates for the past two years if the colleges are to be believed that the standard of student has fallen since we’ve allowed teachers to set their grade.
I mean the idea is that marking schemes are going to be geared so that grades will be inflated to match last years inflation, which means someone will take the fall but it wont be us, its better than a hybrid LC tbh.
The best solution is probably to not inflate grades this year and have the colleges set entrance exams for anyone entering based on last year’s points.
To give some idea of how piss this leaving cert is for my accounting exam I will know exactly what is coming up on the paper before sitting it. I only have to study three types of questions with a few variants to get a H1
Lots of bitter boomers in this comment section hating on students. Ireland is no country for young people.
Making the exams easier = inflated grades?? NO WAY