“To me it seems like they kind of don’t want us to make a fuss.”
Politicians and students have raised concerns about “school profiling” and the fairness of this year’s Leaving Cert results, which will rely on a system of calculated grades.
The class of 2020’s Leaving Cert results will be issued to students on September 7th. These calculated grades will be a combination of predicted grades from teachers and a national standardisation process. Similar results in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland were scrapped after a large cohort of students were downgraded from their original teacher estimates.
Pressure is now building from opposition politicians and students here for the Department to publish the model being used, and a petition to “scrap school profiling”, where a school’s past results can affect the current students’ predicted grades, has garnered over 2,000 signatures.
Social Democrats TD and party Spokesperson for Education Gary Gannon said that as long as this school profiling exists, the calculated grades will not be just;
“These results won’t be legitimate. The Leaving Cert results, OK we all know what it is, but the results that this cohort of Leaving Cert students are getting probably won’t be fair, and they won’t be legitimate because there’ll be too many factors at play here, mostly the historical performance of the school.”
Aidan Cusack, a Leaving Cert 2020 student himself, set up the petition to scrap school profiling, and says students feel they have been left in the dark;
“To me it seems like they kind of don’t want us to make a fuss, that they’re kind of not giving us all the information so we won’t know until we’re affected the same as the UK.”
You can watch the full video below:
"The results that this cohort of Leaving Cert students are getting probably won't be fair, and they won't be legitimate because there'll be too many factors at play here."@noschoolprofile and @1GaryGannon spoke to @RobOHanrahan about problems with the 2020 Leaving Cert results. pic.twitter.com/E673MJQaqz
— JOE.ie (@JOEdotie) August 28, 2020
LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ with Aideen McQueen – Faith healers, Coolock craic and Gigging as Gaeilge
