LEFTFIELD:MINISTER for Education Ruairí Quinn wants the Junior Certificate reformed – quickly. He wants to cut the number of subjects to eight, and he wants to have 50 per cent of the final marks determined by continuous assessment.
Are there merits in these proposals?
My chief concern is the suggestion of using continuous assessment to award up to half of marks.
The ASTI, the second-level teachers’ union, is right to be wary of any plan that could see teachers assessing their own students.
My difficulty with continuous assessment is straightforward: teachers cannot be certain that the work they are assessing is actually that of their student.
Students already do projects or portfolios in a number of subjects, including history, geography, civics (CSPE), religion, technology and science. It’s worth evaluating how these projects operate before extending their marks and subject range.
The awkward truth is that these projects are open to outside influence. There’s a need to place more stringent controls on stopping this, if that’s possible.
As a teacher, there is a natural temptation to take ownership of the student’s project, particularly if you are concerned that a poor mark might reflect badly on your school.
There is nothing to stop a teacher or parent writing vast chunks of a project and then allowing the student to present the project as their own work. At least in a written final exam, we can be assured that what is handed up is fully the work of the student.
I wonder exactly how many students fail projects. Curiously, I have never heard of a student failing a history project, for example. We have little transparency here, as the State Examination Commission gives no breakdown for marks in project work.
There has been talk of “controlled assessment” in which students would do continuous assessment in a “controlled” environment, by means of a computer. Supposedly, this would rule out plagiarism and outside interference.
But Britain has already tried many of these systems and they have been deemed unsuccessful. Indeed, the momentum in Britain is towards the return of old-fashioned exams.
I have yet to see a comprehensive plan by the Department of Education outlining how his system of controlled assessment might work successfully. I also wonder how our under-resourced schools – where basic IT facilities are often lacking – could cope with this approach.
I am also unconvinced that continuous assessment would arrest our decline in literacy and numeracy. In fact, I think it would increase it. Students would gather all the external assistance they could muster to get the best grades, but the work would not be theirs and theirs alone.
Let’s not go down the British route where employers no longer accept GCSE results at face value.
Must the Junior Certificate and then the Leaving Certificate go the same way? While it is true that the current exam structure has too much emphasis on rote learning, that could be corrected without the use of continuous assessment.
By all means place more emphasis on problem solving and critical thinking in a reformed exam. But keep the exam as a real testament to a student’s work.
Barry Hazel teaches at Drimnagh Castle CBS, Dublin. A member of the ASTI central executive, he is writing in a personal capacity
