The Secret Teacher: Class of 2023 must prepare for world without inflated grades

When you mix up the Adams and the Alans and the Sarahs and the Susans in first year, you know you’re doomed to confuse them right the way through to their graduation.

Similarly, when a familiar road layout changes, or the stock all gets moved around in the supermarket, it takes us a few wrong turns before the new route is ingrained in our brains.

These are everyday examples of unlearning; a very tricky business that we do not speak about nearly enough.

Anything learned incorrectly takes conscious unlearning. This is not an easy task, as our brains pride themselves on their efficiency and continue to default to what they already know. Sometimes what they know, and therefore what they tell us, is unhelpful and that is when we need to start the process of unlearning.

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As far as I’m aware, unlearning doesn’t feature anywhere on the curriculum. The need for it is nonetheless evident in our classrooms.

Cast-iron certainties

Covid taught us that things we had considered cast-iron certainties were, in fact, negotiable. State exams had never been postponed since the Leaving Cert started in its current format in 1924. It may have taken close to a century, but in the summer of 2020 for the very first time the exam did not take place. For those who wished to avail of them, exams were offered that autumn, so we did see a 2020 Leaving Cert, of sorts.

The option not to sit all exams persisted into 2021, and that was enough to complete the learning that this staple had a flexibility that we hadn’t realised was possible. Hence the Irish Second-Level Students’ Union strong call for a hybrid model in January of this year. Having learned there was flexibility, it was clearly proving difficult for students to unlearn it.

In order to compensate the cohorts most affected by Covid, adjustments were made to their exam papers. Then, after they had been corrected, grades were inflated in order that further blows were not dealt to youngsters who had suffered enough. This year’s results must always be viewed in the context in which they were arrived at. Grades were only adjusted in the candidates’ favour; in other words no grade deflation was carried out.

Rest assured that deflation is nonetheless very real, even if perhaps for some it will only come in time. Short term, there is the lottery nature of allocating college places. In the medium term, students may struggle to keep pace if they find themselves on courses they would not necessarily have been offered in previous years. Longer term, one would imagine that this year’s Leaving Cert students will never again sit an exam in which what they actually achieve is tweaked in their favour. (An aside to both older and younger siblings: you may as well give up any Leaving Cert rivalry, as your points cannot ever possibly match the sibling who collected their haul this year.)

Unlearning isn’t as easy as one might think, and it is not synonymous with forgetting. It involves consciously moving away from something very much ingrained, and which comes easily – perhaps even automatically. Unlearning is hard work and requires support. A good example you may have experienced is when you drive a car on to a ferry from one side of the road and have to drive off on the other – you’re abroad. You’ll be reminded to drive on the correct side as it is absolutely accepted that people have a natural tendency to fall back to whatever they are used to doing. In these situations we don’t forget how to drive on the more familiar side, but we engage extra carefully so that we are consciously doing what may come less easily.

To stick with driving for a moment, the Leaving Cert class of 2022 benefits from no special allowance in the driving theory test and thank goodness they don’t. Can you imagine assessment being subject to such adjustments that the road safety of new licence-holders became a concern?

Motivating students

That is core to my concern about this year’s Leaving Cert cohort, as the adjustments and inflation their grades benefitted from will not carry over into later life. When more rigidly assessed, some will feel completely out of their depth and question their own ability. How does someone with Leaving Cert results that are among the best in the country wrestle with doubt? Most will be conscious of saving face and protecting the perception that they are top students. To do this will be to internalise the challenge and perhaps miss out on vital support at a critical time.

As educators we know about motivating students and setting them up for success, and now unlearning is an essential here too. It involves acknowledging that much of what appeared negotiable in recent years was only very temporarily so, and that the reasonable accommodations made for them mean that we must look at this year’s results in a particular light. An extension of this is to ensure that these students set reasonable expectations for future academic achievement. This may involve honest conversations about putting support in place for any areas of study that are likely to require it.

Similarly the Leaving Cert groups of 2023 and 2024 will be the first to sit the Leaving Certificate without anyone in the year group having prior experience of State exams. For 2022, those who completed transition year had done the Junior Cert, so some proportion had experienced State exams previously. The 2023 and 2024 cohorts have only lived experience of the highly variable in-house assessment model.

Having learned that that is how things were then, conscious unlearning needs to start now if these cohorts are to be truly ready for the realities – and inflexibilities – that lie ahead of them.