CERTIFICATE POSTPONEMENT ‘We’re having our lives put on the line for the sake of exams’
WHILE we’ve dealt with some major changes – cancellations and postponements – in every facet of our daily lives, the government seems adamant that one thing is certain, this year’s Leaving Cert students will be sitting their exams. The latest update from Education Minister Joe McHugh stated that the exams would go ahead in some form in either the last week of July or first week of August.
Sixth year student at St Peter’s College and an active member of Labour Youth, Oisín Tiernan has lashed out at the Minister’s decision, stating that ‘we’re having our lives put on the line for the sake of exams’.
The Kilmore native penned an eloquent statement on what he believes should happen with the Leaving Cert and how students are being completely ignored in the discussion.
‘The government is showing no regard for our futures, our health or anything else,’ he blasted. ‘We’ve been told they need to go ahead for “tradition”, but this decision could prove fatal. The Leaving Certificate examinations need to be cancelled immediately.’
From an academic point of view, Oisín says that the exams going ahead within the newly laid out time-frame would severely disadvantage certain students.
‘There is a significant amount of students who have not completed the course for their Leaving Cert, and will have to teach themselves the course, which puts them at a disadvantage against other students, as the Leaving Cert is directly a competition for each grade,’ he said. ‘Worse than this, there are students out there who cannot either complete the course or study for multiple reasons. There are students who are living in direct provision, hotels, temporary accommodation, places where they cannot get their study done – households where people do not have the facilities, such as internet access, necessary to get the work they need to do done, and this will negatively influence their results.’
Oisín also points out that if the exams go ahead as per Minister McHugh’s latest plans, students will be facing into tests after a full 16-week absence from the classroom.
‘This is why postponement is not a good alternative,’ he explains. ‘The longer you postpone, the longer students have been out of school, thus the worse the exam results will get. Postponement means students might not be able to even enter into college until next year – there is very little scope for late entry into college courses, and it will cause severe disruption. Students who are going abroad will not be able to due to their delayed Leaving Cert results – I’ve applied for a course in the University of Maastricht and got a conditional acceptance, and with a postponed Leaving Cert I’m unlikely to get my results in time.’
However, Oisín believes that the issues with a postponed Leaving Cert are not merely academic.
‘In the midst of a health crisis, holding exams is a terrible idea as it puts the lives of tens of thousands of people at direct risk,’ he said. ‘If we have anywhere between 20 and 150 exam students in one hall, and one of them has the virus, then it will spread, and soon that one will become two, then three, and so on. There is no scope for 2 metre social distancing in an exam hall – you’d need to keep them 2 metres apart inside the exam hall, outside of it, outside the bathrooms, coming into the school itself, and then you’d have the exam attendant coming close to them all to hand out and collect papers etc.’
Oisín went on to brand the holding of any exams in the next few months as being ‘a blatant disregard for public health’ and stated his own very personal reasons for being anxious about contracting the virus.
‘This is a case of the government allowing the lives of students with underlying conditions (such as cancer, diabetes and asthma) who are vulnerable to this disease to be put on the line for the sake of what Joe McHugh has called “tradition”,’ he blasts. ‘The parents and relatives of these people will be put at further risk – myself included. My father suffers from chronic myeloid leukaemia, for which he takes immunosuppressant drugs, and, with his condition, he is very vulnerable to the virus. So to make students in these situations do these exams and put at risk the lives of people around them is totally unfair. The only alternative to this problem is to totally scrap the exams and replace them with another form of grading, such as estimated grades by teachers.’
Under this proposal, Oisín suggests that teachers could combine scores from mocks, Christmas tests, assignments and other pieces of school-work, as well as their honest opinion of what each student would get. While unprecedented, we find ourselves in an unprecedented situation.
‘It would be much more accurate than students doing exams that they are not properly prepared for, and less perilous to them health-wise,’ he concluded. ‘This may not be a perfect solution in some people’s eyes, but there is no perfect solution amidst this crisis. This is the one that will do the least harm to people. Running exams is a perilous and unfair risk to place upon sixth years in Ireland and their families. The Leaving Cert needs to be cancelled for this year and soon, to prevent the spread of this disease any further, and allow students a fair passage into third level education.’