TBH: An unheard voice in educationA leaving cert student writes:

I have just taken my Leaving Certificate Irish oral exams. In my experience, these exams, which are worth 40 per cent of the Irish mark, are conducted in an unjust and utterly inadequate way. I spoke to friends in my own and other schools about their experiences and discovered many anomalies and problems.

The problems experienced in various schools, as related to me by peers, range from examiners not being fluent in the language they are supposedly testing to the tests being carried out in different ways from one school to the next. Once again, I would like to make it clear that these problems were experienced in a number of schools, not just one, and these stories were heard from a number of different students.

A quick example: The new oral contains a section called “sraith pictúirí”’ or 20 short stories based on a sequence of pictures.

Many students found this to be the hardest part of the exam as it required you to know and explain 20 different short stories in Irish. The story was meant to be chosen at random in the exam so that we would have no notion of what we would get. Here lies the inconsistency.

In a number of schools (who shall remain nameless for obvious reasons) the examiner asked the students which picture they had a preference for and proceeded to take that picture and examine the students on it. What this means is that you now have some students getting to choose their favourite picture, while with other students it isleft purely to chance. These pictures range in difficulty.

If these exams were of no significance I would not be writing this letter. However, these orals are worth two or three grades by themselves and can determine the results you get. And when students are competing against each other for a limited number of places in college, it is simply unjust. A number of other students reported to me that the examiner was not fluent enough to cope with their standard and told one of them to just talk for 10 minutes, instead of asking any questions.

This raises the question of screening. Do these same people end up correcting the Leaving Cert exam papers? If it is the case that these same examiners have the same lack of interest in the work they do correcting exams over the summer, it unfortunately undermines the entire system.

While I appreciate that it is a difficult task to monitor the vast number of examiners across the country, something must be done to fix the problems outlined above. A screening process must be either put in place or rectified (if it already exists) to ensure that the reputation and relevance of the Leaving Certificate is maintained.

This column is designed to give a voice to those within the education system who wish to speak out anonymously. Contributions are welcome. E-mail sflynn@irishtimes.com