By making her point, Rebecca has done all students a huge service

One university hopeful’s struggle to challenge her results strikes an angry and frustrating chord, writes

‘I can still feel the anger inside me, years later’

REBECCA Carter’s case against the State Examinations Commission must have sent a shiver down the spine of any student approaching their Leaving Cert.

A simple totting-up error on her Business Studies exam would have set her studies back an entire year if she had not taken the SEC to court to challenge its re-marking system.

With no option to fast-track cases, corrections to simple errors do not appear until October, when, through no fault of their own, it is too late for students to start their preferred university courses.

The judge who ruled decisively in Ms Carter’s favour called the re-marking scheme “unfit for purpose”, which will come as no surprise to anyone who has gone through the arduous recheck process. I recognised this only too well, as I went through the same procedure five years ago. My case was, admittedly, more complicated than Rebecca Carter’s and more difficult to rectify. Needing an A2 to make my offer to study Classics at a UK university, I was awarded a B3.

When I was allowed to view my script at the end of August, I realised the paper had been marked very poorly (with entire sections of answers receiving no marks at all) and that I needed to have it rechecked.

This recheck came back in October, bumping me up to a B1, the actual mark just one third of a percentage point away from the grade I needed. After a trip to the State Examination Commission’s centre in Athlone, where my parents and I submitted pages of notes on why my paper deserved a higher mark, we appealed the recheck and it was re-graded to an A2.

At this point, however, the term was already halfway through. I had no option but to wait for the next year to start my studies. The SEC, when challenged on its recheck system, is adamant that its integrity holds up to scrutiny.

I was told countless times that, if my paper did turn out to have been marked incorrectly, it would be corrected and the paper given the mark it deserved.

This was presented as a great virtue of the system, rather than the bare minimum it should seek to achieve. A paper receiving the grade it deserved should not rest on the SEC’s discretion; it should be something to which students are entitled.

The SEC’s refusal to see how its system affects people fails to take into account the very real consequences that waiting for a year can have on the student.

In my case, it was an extremely expensive one. Everyone told me it was very unlikely my paper would be upgraded by such a high margin and to forget about getting into Cambridge, my first choice.

I decided to start my back-up course at St Andrews in Scotland with a vague hope I might yet make it to Cambridge. (I asked St Andrews if I could defer my place until the next year but it refused).

Once my paper was upgraded and I decided to take the place at Cambridge the following year, I had to drop out of St Andrews after a semester. This was a rather expensive way to spend half a year.

The continued refrain which I heard from the SEC was that the integrity of its system made the process take longer and that doing things any other way — ie, fast-tracking some rechecks — would be unfair to other students.

This always struck my parents and me as utterly ridiculous. Equality does not mean treating everyone the same, regardless of their needs. It means the exact opposite.

Patients who come into A&E needing urgent treatment are not put in a queue behind patients with a sore toe. They’re treated immediately. Likewise with exam rechecks. Not all students need their papers re-marked urgently. Some have already made their preferred university offers and are simply indignant at being under-marked.

Others, such as myself and Rebecca Carter, need to be processed more quickly because the implications of the error are extremely burdensome on their future.

It ought to be possible for a modern exam system to have the flexibility to deal with students on the basis of this need. But every effort to make this case to the SEC fell on deaf ears. Thousands — literally thousands — of words went back and forth between the SEC and our house and it never budged an inch. It just went on repeating the same meaningless mantra. I can still feel the frustration and anger inside me, years on.

What became increasingly clear was that the SEC cares a lot more about upholding the rules of its system than it does about providing a top-class service to students.

In Rebecca Carter’s case, the SEC would have been happy to fix the error immediately had it occurred on the front page of her exam script, rather than inside, and considered this a reasonable excuse to delay her studies for a year.

Everyone knew she had the right number of points to get on to her course but sheer bureaucracy prevented her from achieving this within what anyone with an ounce of sense would surely regard as a reasonable time frame.

The solution to her problem was so simple and yet their system was unable to cope quickly and efficiently with it.

With its emphasis on the socalled “integrity” of its system, you could be forgiven for thinking there are protections in place to ensure students feel they have been given a fair hearing. These are rather few and far between.

We were assured many times the rechecks would be monitored by independent scrutineers and this provided a glimmer of hope.

We were quite surprised, therefore, to find the independent scrutineers’ report consisted of one line: “Dear Emer, I have examined the relevant documentation and am satisfied the State Examinations Commission has carried out the appeal process properly.”

This was something of a shock as in some cases my exam answers had been marked negatively, with points deducted for what I had omitted to mention rather than awarded for what I had said — something that is not supposed to happen — and in some sections I had been marked down for not including points which weren’t even mentioned in the marking scheme.

Again, this was all highly irregular but no one was willing to admit there was anything flawed in the system.

These may seem like petty concerns but when they stand between you and your dream course, you inevitably start to question the integrity of the system.

We even took it to the Ombudsman and, after months of back and forth, he eventually concluded the SEC had done all that it could.

We were flabbergasted and demoralised. There was no budging from the system. In light of last week’s high court ruling, that ruling by the Ombudsman looks even more inexplicable.

In any system like the SEC’s, mistakes will be made. They’re only human. The SEC claims there are around 5,000 rechecks annually.

These mistakes, though, should not be regarded as a challenge to the system’s integrity — rather, the system’s integrity should be able to cope with it. Had the SEC been able to show a little more flexibility, as well as understanding that not all recheck cases are the same or of similar urgency, it would have shown that its integrity was oriented towards student welfare and reality.

As the case currently stands, it is unsurprising the judge called the process “unfit for purpose”.

I am just astounded it took this long for someone to take the SEC to court over it. But I am delighted Rebecca Carter won. She has done a huge service to every student in the future.