Pressure mounts on Minister Foley

Doubt over capacity to deal with demand for college places

EDUCATION Minister Norma Foley was last night under mounting pressure after it emerged there won’t be enough college places for students impacted by Leaving Certificate blunders.

It comes as she revealed that an American company may finish its independent examination of all Leaving Certificate results as soon as today.

Such a swift delivery would be welcomed by concerned Leaving Cert students, who are eager to learn their correct grades as soon as possible.

Ms Foley said the company, Education Testing Service, which she said conducts 50million achievement and admission tests per year, is working to finish its review as soon as possible.

In a late-night Dáil session last ni g ht, Minister Fol e y also announced that the deadline for sitting the physical Leaving Cert exam on November 16, due to expire today, has been postponed until next week.

She also revealed there was no

There was ‘extreme urgency’

time to run a full procurement process before hiring the Canadian firm that wrongly marked down 6,500 Leaving Cert students.

Ms Foley said there was ‘extreme urgency’ in getting a calculated grades system in place because of the coronavirus crisis.

She said her department was forced to use a ‘negotiating procedure’ that did not advertise the tender in the usual way.

The c o mpany it chose, Polymetrika International, in Ottawa, Canada, made two mistakes in creating a predicted grade system, leading to 7,200 grades being wrongly downgraded, Ms Foley admitted.

She said that she in no way was trying to downplay the seriousness of the situation.

She said the 7,200 grades affected about 6,500 students and that some students were wrongly downgraded on more than one subject.

She said ‘ many, many teachers’ had put aside their objections to the predicted grade system to make it work and that she wanted to salute them

Outlining the course of events in greater detail, she told the Dáil that Polymetrika informed the Department of Educati o n calculated grade office on Tuesday evening of last week that there was a problem with the calculated grade process.

Polymetrika and the calculated grade office agreed that the Canadian company would investigate further and report back the next morning.

Polymetrika reported to the calculated grade executive office the next morning that there was a mistake in the code.

On Wednesday afternoon, the calculated grade office notified the minister. At that point, she knew of the mistake in one line out of 50,000 lines of coding but her office didn’t know how many students if would affect. The Education Minister said the department had to find out as much as possible before making a statement.

Both t he department and Polymetrika did a detailed analysis of 40,000 exam results, now knowing that Polymetrika had wrongly assessed students on their classes’ combined Junior Cert results in English, Irish, maths and their two weakest subjects, instead of their two best subjects.

In the course of this review, the department uncovered on Friday that there was another mistake, and that another subject was also included in the Junior Cert calculation, along with English, maths and Irish.

Her office then conducted a ‘detailed walk-through’ of the system and verified it wi t h Polymetrika.

‘Nothing further was found,’ she said, but she wanted ‘another level of assurance’ and so instructed her staff to hire an independent company to verify the system.

Sinn Féin’s education spokesman, Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire, criticised the minister for not making the error public when she first learned about it.

‘It would have made a big difference to students who signed leases last week,’ said the TD.

Mr Ó Laoghaire also hit out at the Education Minister for not publishing the controversial algorithm, saying the error might have been noticed sooner if it hadn’t been ‘kept under lock and key’.

‘Kept under lock and key’