Spare a thought for the Junior Cycle students of 2022

Sometimes treasures are found tucked away in the internet’s forgotten corners. Ten years ago, Paul English posted on wheresgrandad.wordpress.com a letter parents received from the rector of Good Counsel College, New Ross, in 1987. The letter accompanied their sons’ Inter Cert results.

The good rector declared that all Intermediate results in recent years “have been highly inflated and need to be treated with great caution”. Aside from English, Irish and Maths, these results could not be considered “safe predictors” of how a student will do at Leaving Cert Level. In fact, the rector continued, the level of grade inflation meant that they could lead to “a false sense of security and very unrealistic expectations regarding the Leaving Certificate”.

Goodness knows what the rector would make of the new Junior Cycle and the gulf that stretches between it and the Leaving Certificate exam. (The gulf is even wider for the two successive year groups who did not even get to sit a Junior level exam during the pandemic.)

What would the rector make of a Minister for Education who has promised the Leaving Certs exactly the same level of grade inflation as occurred in the past two years?

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The rector’s concerns about “high grades being scattered like confetti” are even funnier when you look at the 1987 Inter Cert English Paper One. For 10 marks, you were invited to “write out the clauses into which you would separate the following sentence, indicate the subject and predicate of each clause, and state the function of each subordinate clause”.

The same question today would cause quiet sobbing in the examination hall.

You could avoid this task along with another less onerous question by instead writing, for 20 marks, a letter of condolence to a friend who had recently suffered a serious bereavement. In the Junior Cycle English exam this week, which now only has one paper, the equivalent question, worth 25 marks, was writing an A4 page diary entry beginning with, “Dear Diary, you won’t believe what has happened! Today has been a day that filled me with hope…”

There is a parable about social change in the intervening 35 years simply in the contrast between those two topics.

The 1987 prose composition choices, worth 100 marks, included a short story inspired by the title, “Too many cooks spoil the broth”, a debate motion that sport and politics should not be mixed, an essay on farming as a career, and my favourite, “Starting your own Business”.

Immense shock

Junior Cycle students will never be asked to write a prose composition, and given the 1987 topics, they may be thankful. It is still a shame that extended pieces of writing are not examined, although students can still write them in class or for homework. The shock of facing long essays in Leaving Cert English is immense.

The 1987 comprehension section was so over-written that it inspired a blistering analysis by Christina Murphy, this paper’s legendary education correspondent for nearly 25 years. She described it as a “piece of stylised nonsense” featuring phrases like “wan sick clouds like damp souls wafting over Dublin Airport”. “Unfortunate 15-year-old students” had to summarise the principal ideas in 140 words or less. The problem was, Murphy said, that it was difficult to find any ideas in it at all.

This year’s Junior Cycle students merely had to contend with an over-written piece of free verse that featured lines like “More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbour’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their candy-coloured blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me.”

It really got to the unfortunate 15-year-old students of 2022 as well.

This is the first year every subject has transitioned to the new Junior Cycle specification, with common level papers in every subject except Irish, English and Maths.

Common level papers are often too challenging for students who struggle academically. Previously they would have had a chance to shine in an Ordinary Level paper. Common papers are not challenging enough for those who excel.

This cohort had little access to previous papers because the Junior Cert/Cycle hybrid was cancelled for two years. Sample papers were decidedly sparse, too.

This year’s students are the guinea pigs for the new Junior Cycle exams after the travails of lockdowns, patchy online teaching provision, and unavoidable large-scale absences of teachers due to Covid-19.

They will also be the guinea pigs for the first examination in 2023 of Leaving Cert paper one in English and Irish at the end of fifth year. While I support modular examinations, examining paper one at the end of fifth year is an unnecessarily crude version of the idea. Topics from paper two might have been a better choice.

Inter Cert students in 1987 faced far more challenging papers, which were followed for some by a headmaster’s letter sternly warning them against complacency. The Junior Cycle students of 2022 have lived through challenging circumstances the 1987 students would have laughed off as speculative fiction.