Public interest in the management of the States national certificate examinations has been heightened this year because of the debacle of the lost art projects, followed by the more recent finding of wood work projects by a roadside in Roscommon. These episodes resulted in some undermining of confidences in the reliability of the exam procedures, and the Minister for Education quickly moved to commission a report from consultants Price Waterhouse. This report will not be published until this year's exams are over a sensible move as publication now could only increase the stress and pressure on exam candidates.
Despite these incidents which, it should be noted, concerned only subjects which involved bulky project work the 130,000 students starting their exams today can do so with reasonable confidence that the system works well. The level of security and the checks and balances involved in the management of both the Junior and Leaving Certificates are extensive and the procedures for monitoring standards during the correcting are exhaustive. The controversy generated by the missing art projects will, in all likelihood, result in the procedures being even more strenuously applied this year. Exam candidates can rest assured that their efforts will be fairly and objectively assessed and that they are not at any disadvantage relative to candidates in any other year.
In many ways the losing of the practical projects was a disaster waiting to happen. The complexity of the certificate examinations has increased dramatically in recent years with the addition of aurals, oral examining and practicals. This has put considerable additional pressure on schools and also on the Department of Education's examinations branch. There is general agreement that much more of this broader form of assessment is desirable, but it does require that the whole management and time tabling of the exams be reassessed.
The Price Waterhouse report will provide the ideal opportunity for such a wider appraisal such an appraisal would also need to take into account the need for more school based assessment and the extension of practicals and project work to more subjects. There is a danger that the reaction to the recent debacles would be to dismiss project assessment as unreliable, when the reality is simply that the system was not adequately overhauled to deal with such forms of assessment.
Meanwhile, the good news for the 130,000 students sitting their exams over the next three weeks is that in all likelihood college entry points will have plateaued if not actually fallen this year. The expansion of the Transition Year programme in schools has reduced the numbers sitting the Leaving Cert this year, thus easing the pressure on college places. But with the Junior Cert also showing a decline in numbers for the second year in a row, it is clear that the decline in births which began in 1981 is about to reflect itself in falling numbers sitting the Leaving Cert each year.
With college places increasing, Leaving Cert numbers declining and an absolutely buoyant graduate jobs market, 1996 promises to be a very good year indeed for Leaving Cert students.