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The Daily PollLEAVING CERT STUDENTS could soon have to take an English-language oral examination, new proposals say.
The exam, taken at the end of fifth year, will largely focus on existing course material such as plays, novels and poems. It will be worth 20% of students’ overall grade and held at a common level.
Creative writing assessments will be worth another 20% of students’ final grade while a final, written exam will be worth 60%.
Examiners hope that the development of effective communication and meaningful conversation skills among students can be encouraged through oral examinations.
So today, we’re asking: Should the Leaving Cert have fewer traditional written exams?
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DIY and handy work or gardening farming needs to be introduced. These are vital skills needed to keep the country going.
@Lance Taylor: Yes, practical skills for today’s realities, budgeting, plumbing, carpentry, how to build your own house, how to provide your own medical care, how to cope with living with your parents in your 40s, how to survive homelessness.
@Lance Taylor: I never saw a homeless crow
I never saw a homeless crow,
Builds high rise penthouse view
Wondrous skill with wing and bill
No hands like humans do
Eighteen years of books and tears,
Can read but just can’t do
No boiler fired, no skills acquired
They stand there – not a clue.
So ask a crow ’cause they all know
How to craft, to build, to hone
And not, like lazy cuckoos
Expect others build their home
R Neuville on Vias Beach ⛱️
@Lance Taylor: I also think flower-arranging would be very beneficial!
Make Irish optional, if people want to learn a dead language, let them choose to do so
@Mr. Biggins: you’re the man
We shout from the hills about how amazing our exam system is. OECD results say we are second to Finland yet the department made the junior cert a joke, one paper and some don’t have higher level so any higher achievers aren’t challenged. Now they plan on dumbing down the leaving cert and it’s allll to save money on corrections etc
@Nurse On Call.: I don’t disagree with anything you say but I’m not sure how any financial savings will be made. Someone still has to act as the examiner for the oral exam. That won’t be done for free & may involve travel expenses. It’s just another dumbing down of our education system.
@Nurse On Call.: make worse. It’s what we do best, do you see any other services that aren’t in tatters? Exactly, we’ve destroyed health, housing, transport and now moved onto education. In a few years when we’ve ruined that I wonder will we be happy with our total inability to value quality. We are in many ways, still toothless peasants
@Nurse On Call.: Speaking from a teacher’s perspective, I think our system is good/very good. Quite a few things could be substantially improved. Still too much emphasis on 2 weeks or so in June to measure a student’s ability. They have moved some of the percentages to projects/exams at an earlier stage but could do more. I agree with someone else here who mentioned teaching a lot more practical, life skills type things, etc. Our school has Transition Year and the TYs do quite a bit of that during that year.
The whole grinds business is a bit of a joke also. I know some teachers that give grinds to small groups and make a nice little earner. Safe to say the taxman never hears of them. Not sure how they can be stopped but they are a disaster really.
Yes. I want to do my Higher Irish paper through the style of interpretative drag dance only. I call it La Mode Coinníollach.
@Luas Vuitton – Penneys Drag Queen: fail
@Luas Vuitton – Penneys Drag Queen: Stop trolling on every article
@Rian O’Sullivan: im sick of reading it
@Luas Vuitton – Penneys Drag Queen: leigh anois go curamach
The media should stop banging on and on morning noon and night about this bloody exam.
@Leonard Barry: Shouldn’t you be in school?
If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. The Leaving Cert as an exam system is currently fine the way it is, no point excessively tweaking it so that teenagers are dumbed down further. We’ve already seen this with the Junior Cert, where kids can no longer fail exams and everyone can move onto the Leaving Cert no matter what. An oral exam in English? Give me a break! Knowing how to speak English should be a given if you’re taking the Leaving Cert in the first place. There should be no easy handouts to teenagers who don’t want to put in the work and learn the poems off and practice how to compose short stories and write essays. It’s unfair on those who actually put in the work. Instead of turning the Leaving Cert into another Junior Cert, we should be pushing for more people to enter trades.
Yes dumbing down all exams is a good thing, as it allows easier access for DEI persons!
No. Every generation must suffer more, not less. Any move to change or reform anything is a hallmark of society’s ever quickening descent into a vortex spineless snowflakery and has all the hallmarks of the evil wokerati. McGregor for the Aras!
@Setanta O’Toole: “I am Enoch Burke and I approve of this anti-transgenderism meesage (Did I get paid this week?)”
Exams should be banned!
No.
Definitely nerd to focus more on trade based skill during second level but also need to stop dumbing down our young people. Give them the skills that are needed and the intellect to carry them out. The leaving cert should never have gone the predicted grades rout.
Exams make problems for students who depend on AI to do their work for them. So, no. This would result in educational institutions losing money, as student cheating would be severely impacted leading to a rise in failure rates.
Level the playing field
Count four subjects for CAO point.
Focus your energy on what you’re good at.
Do ordinary level in the rest.
Stop forcing Top class STEM students to do three language subjects for the leaving cert.
Why are strong maths business engineering students studying literature in two languages at the age of 18/19.
@John Doe: so we don’t end up with Engineers who can’t put together sensible instructions for the things they are making. English language skills are critical, and everyone should have some level of ability in that. Most students aren’t forced to do a modern foreign language at all.
There should be NO mandatory exam subjects for leaving cert
Traditional written exams, and oral exams, are the only way to beat cheating with AI. Portfolio work, and other project work, is wide open to AI cheating
If I am bad at maths, I can do ordinary level for the leaving. If I am bad at business science, I can give them up altogether. But if I am bad at languages, I have to take three languages for the leaving cert … and I have to study literature in two of them. How is that fair?
@John Doe: again this isn’t accurate.
Why is there such a push on changing us into americans? More written work needed if anything, researching broadens the mind and helps cultivate critical thinking. Better than living lives according to what smartphones tell us to do.
Yes. The futility of education is demonstrated on a daily basis in the Journal’s comment sections.
I am all for traditional exams, AI makes them problematic for a minority of students who plagiarise, they wouldn’t get away with using AI in University, they would be out on their ear.
@Áine G: Plagiarism is rife in University
The whole junior and and leaving cert need changing..
I wasted years forced to learn useless muck that would never benefit me in life poetry..prose..plays in english for 5 years intercert and leaving cert…..Art..irish…PE classes..what a waste of my life…time for crraapp i did not need was never gonna need in the future…ypu spend 8 years learning english reading and writing..thats enough…this crrapp poets…prose stupid shakespeare plays ..all of it crap.
I came out of secondry school
I couldnt fix a plug
I couldnt fix a washing machine
I knew nothing about money management
I knew no plumbing
Couldnt fix a basic car problem
Knew nothing about DIY
No technology
Wasted thousands of hours and years on rubish i listed above
@Pol O Nuanain: So lets do away with Art, Literature, and anything that widens our view of the world?
I agree that when you come out of school, you should be able to fix a plug, washing machine, basic plumbing, replace a light bulb, have the basics of money management understand basic car maintenance, and have some DIY skills.
But does that mean that we have to throw out learning about the civilisation we live in?
@Pol O Nuanain: One of the purposes of education is to teach us to think outside the box. To see beyond the obvious. That’s where poetry and Shakespeare comes in. That still needs to happen in tandem with more skills based subjects as you suggested.
@Teresa Joyce: yep learn it outside school hours..Shakes is dead..so is woodsworth..and the rest of them..No place in schools that do not benefit students when leaving…its snobby bullshit..James joyce and the rest of them dont pay your bills..
@Nick Caffrey: Yep join a library..students need lifeskills..Generation out there who cant boil an egg…Home Economics is life..Every school from infants should be teaching it.
@Pol O Nuanain:
If you couldn’t change a plug or a lightbulb, or how to sow a button or cook, then that’s on your parents.
Can’t manage your money – again, that’s on your parents.
Not everyone wants to know how to drive or own a car.
Given kids do nothing but look at thick-tok then they can use that or youtube to find out how to do a bit of DIY
Languages are important when you look at the amount of young people who emigrate when they’ve finished school/college because not all of them emigrate to English speaking countries.
In a recent survey (2023) it was found that 12% of students in secondary school get exemptions for Irish based on their claim that they have problems learning languages, yet 10% of those students, had no problem learning French, German, Spanish which negates their claim that they have a problem learning languages.
Anything goes wrong with an appliance then a professional needs to fix it. If you have contents insurance, and your fridge stops working and you fix it yourself – then two weeks later you get in from work and find your kitchen flooded and all the food defrosted,and you put in a claim they won’t pay out because instead of getting a professional to fix the initial problem and you’ve done it yourself, they won’t pay out, unless of course you’re going to lie.
Maths on the other hand, while it’s essential to know how to add subtract, divide, work out fractions and how interest rates and interest types work, most people will never use Pythagorean theorem or algebra, once they’ve left school.
@Ann Reddin: *** sew a button
@Teresa Joyce: Have to disagree with your belief that learning Shakespeare helps to see beyond the obvious. The only subject in school that encourages critical thinking is history and the proof of that is that far too many don’t listen or care about the past, and here we are today with fascism on the rise, because those who didn’t listen or engage their brains don’t recognise that the world has turned back the clock and we’re all living 1930s Germany.
@Pol O Nuanain: just because you were a waster doesn’t mean we should scrap the school system. I’m sure those who had the joy of teaching were just as enthusiastic about you being in the room.
There should be no leaving cert.
Secondary school should be based on a bit of what we currently learn and life’s requirements pensions, taxes, mortgages bills etc..
Option 1 At 16 leave and do trade
Option two if wanting to go to university you spend x amount of time doing free work experience to see would you really like do study and get a career in this field.
Then do get into university you write up what you learned from the work experience and why you want to get into this field etc… followed by an entrance exam.
@Be Lucky: the most popular degrees have hundreds of people in the year. Good luck finding potentially thousands of employers in presumably high skilled jobs willing to give people with no experience a placement, lecturers to do thousands of interviews, and invigilators for entrance exams when they’ve broken their bolox to get into the course in the leaving in the first place. If people want to pursue a third level education, they should be encouraged, not have even more obstacles put in their way.
@Be Lucky: There are plenty of those skills taught at school. The unfortunate reality is everyone goes to school at precisely the same time as they are most unlikely to listen to authority figures or apply themselves.
Sure why not just make it a colouring competition altogether while you’re at it.
The leading cert and education in general have been “dumbed down” too much already! This trend desperately needs to be reversed!
Sure some of the m can’t write anyw
I mucked up that comment ha ha ha
I would have liked to say Yes to this question, but unfortunately AI has destroyed the integrity of non-exam work. The exam hall is the only place left which can be kept reasonably free of Chat GPT and similar writing aids.
Yes, absolutely, how we learn has changed, we all now walk around with the greatest encyclopaedia in our pocket. We can practice heart surgery in virtual reality! If learning has changed so too should the assessment of learning.
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