Compare and contrast exam results

The Irish Leaving Cert:

Minister backs bonus points system for maths and science

Poor marks in maths, science in Leaving cert results

English A-levels:

Record passes revive calls for review of exam system

Maths fuels rise in top grades at A-level


"Learning isn't cool"
A comment from a educational officer, on how the basic skills of reading, writing, and numeracy are absent in some young british school-leavers, after spending 11 years in school. It was part of a documentary focusing on how the labour of Polish immigrants is now often favoured over that of workers native to the UK.

Firstly, to deal with the irish conundrum on poor performance in the technical areas.

I don't know if it was always the way with Irish students - I don't think it was, to be honest - but lately, I've seen people over here on my course from my home country who have refined the skill of rote learning down to a fine art. It's something I've never been able to do for as long as I've been in a classroom. My thing has always been solving, re-ordering, analysing, and processing. It's the reason I steered clear of subjects like Business Studies, Home Economics, Biology, and Geography in school. It is, however, the way that a lot of students now seem to get through second-level (and in particular, points factory grind schools), and I can see it on my course. I can't fault it, because it requires no small work ethic, and can net someone a pass in a subject even when they don't fully understand what it is they're studying, but it can't be applied to technical subjects. If grades in maths and the sciences are lousy (and I think a lot of that really is only hype), then that is because students are choosing to just try and bulldoze their way through it with memorization rather than actually getting to grips with it properly.

I remember in first year in school, I had what was a definite contender for worst teacher of the year instructing us in maths. I failed that subject in the end-of-year tests, along with most of the other students, and the teacher was promptly juggled out of our classroom and into another of poor unfortunates waiting to be bored to tears. If you had said to me then that I would end up netting a good B in honours maths in the leaving cert, I would have laughed, but the following year, I was fortunate enough to get a good teacher in the subject, and after that, I never struggled with it again. What I think the problem is, is that a lot of people aren't pushed beyond this initial hurdle. Once you get over the initial incomprehension with the subject, it's like riding a bike. You never forget. Once it does click with you, you will also find that all other technical subjects like the sciences will come much more easily to you as well. This is where the experts need to start, because I've noticed that amongst students who are of enough ability to regard all subjects as equal, the science and maths subjects are always chosen, because scoring highly in them can be a more straighforward matter in a lot of ways. It beats sweating blood and tears over an Irish essay, only to get a C afterwards, that's for sure.

So, good maths teachers are needed to get to the root of the problem, but then that raises the whole issue of how the HDip for secondary school is a convenient qualification to fall into for unemployed and indifferent college graduates, and that's for another day.

Failing the above, you could always get the artistically minded students to watch Darren Aronofsky's Pi and hope for the best. Or get the girls to watch A Beautiful Mind, on the pretext that it's got Russell Crowe in it.

Now, onto where these subjects can lead you.

Mary Harney, the minister referred to in the second link, has been sharing a bed with industrial interests for quite some time now. It is no surprise to hear her encouraging Irish students to sharpen up their technical skills, for then they become viable candidates for employment with the companies she so desperately wants to keep happy and whose investment in this country she works so hard to secure.

It has been said that in order for companies to invest in Ireland, an adequate 'knowledge base' must be present. For this, you can almost read 'worker drones who are prepared to accept minimal rewards for maximum technical endeavour'. It is often pointed out that there are still lots of jobs to be had in the technical and scientific sector. What the media conveniently forget to mention most of the time, is what the nature of these jobs really are. Working in what can be a intellectually very challenging area, designing or refining a product that will generate the company a great deal of revenue, and then having to negotiate a measly 3-4% pay increase in your yearly performance review. Thank you, but no.

That's not to say that the aforementioned academic areas aren't important. You'd have to be an idiot to think that, but they aren't rewarded all that much in the marketplace. For example, chemists (people who have studied chemistry, as opposed to pharmacy, in case you misunderstand), a group of people who have engaged in the study of a subject that is the amongst the most challenging you may care to mention, and who have at their fingertips knowledge that is fundamental to the life sciences, are not amongst the most well-paid in industry in general, and are amongst the least well-paid in the pharmaceutical industry in particular. Fact. I'd feel a little cheated if I'd struggled with that area for a minimum of four years in higher education, and then found out I'd have to take weekend shifts where I worked to make ends meet. That's the situation that one of the mature students in my class found himself in before he went back to college.

I remember roughly 10 years ago, quite a few courses were introduced in the irish universities that were 'close' to industry. By this I mean the courses were tailored towards the passing on of a body of knowledge specific to various kinds of industry. Materials science was one. Marine science was another. Industrial engineering another. Year after year, those courses were only partly filled, with most of those accepting the offer doing so because they hadn't got anything else, or didn't know any better. By not knowing better, I mean that while the courses were being tailored towards certain kinds of jobs in industry, anyone taking them seemed unaware that they would find themselves in a serious bind if that particular industry dried up years later and those workers found themselves at the mercy of their company, unable to leave. That's what happened in IT (and may well still be happening now, for all I know) when the recession hit there. Wage freezes were brought in by the truckload, and there was sod-all the employees could do about it.

Around about this time, a lot of academics in the developing areas moaned that the candidates with the best grades in science subjects were hightailing it into medicine and the like, and ignoring their areas. At this time of going to press, this is still the case. Applications for science and engineering courses are still falling. There is a reason for this. Healthcare courses, having been around the longest of all, have a proven track record in generating rewards for people once they enter the market. Working for a company as an authority in a particular area generates a lot of money for that company, of which you will only see a fraction.

The fact is, if you choose to work in the corporate technical sector, you need to be aware that it can backfire on you, and this is something that people advocating the study of technical subjects don't really tell you. In a particular area, once the number of employees exceeds the number of jobs out there, you're fucked, and this is precisely why I chose for my career something that is not usually perceived as a hotbed of scintillation: There are almost always more jobs than pharmacists to fill them.

And lastly, but most certainly not least, you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make them drink, and if Irish students are displaying ineptitude in this area, promising them bonus points if they do well isn't really going to achieve much. Ten years ago, it was appreciated that our syllabus in maths was amongst the most rigorous in the world, next to Japan, and then it was overhauled and made a bit easier. We need to leave the course itself alone now, and go after the students themselves.

And now, onto our over-achieving neighbours.

First a hypothetical question for our audience. If you are allowed to pick three subjects to study at any level in school, hands up those of you who are going to pick subjects that they don't really like, or pick subjects they're not really good at.

Are you getting this, everyone? People are doing well at A-levels because they are studying subjects that they are free to opt for!

The A-level system is somewhat unique in that it allows academic specialisation at a stage in education where most other systems would still have a student studying a number of mandatory subjects. In Ireland, you have to do seven subjects at leaving cert level, of which only 3 (in some schools 4) are chosen by the student. In Scotland, you do five subjects for the higher exams. The French/International baccalaureat, while allowing the flexibility of studying a number of subjects to more depth than others, still requires the reading of a broad range of subjects. In Canada, Australia, and America, the situation is roughly the same. Which is better, allowing someone to specialise early in their academic careers, or instil in them some knowledge of a variety of subjects before they leave school, is a moot point. Allowing a technically minded person to ditch the humanities early on can prevent them from achieving a fully rounded education, but requiring them to study them when they don't want to isn't going to develop in them a great appreciation for the subject either.

Then there are the succes stories of the sciences and maths. This is simply because no-one in their right mind is going to opt for these subjects at A-level unless they are at least halfway good at them. These are simply not doss subjects, not by any stretch of the imagination, and only students with their eye on science, engineering or healthcare courses (again, not exactly a cakewalk at third level) will opt for them. It's not that they're easy, it's that the students doing them are prepared to work hard.

It has to be said, though, 3 A-levels is not the most taxing workload. While the level a subject is studied at probably is ahead of the level the same subject would be studied at under a different secondary school system, it is only winning that race by a nose. This is already reflected in the fact that some students are now opting for a fourth A-level, and some even for five. Yet snot-nosed british universites seem to have a problem with recognising any qualification outside of their own. I was required to get an A in leaving cert honours chemistry in Ireland for the course I'm in now, but my English classmates would have got in with a C in A-level chemistry, and I can tell you now, there is not much difference between the two courses.

Having said that, the whole concept of education has changed since the naysayers in their 60s got their degrees. It's next to essential to get some award of higher education under your belt now before entering the jobs market, and a lot of courses, and places on those courses, are springing up to meet this demand. Students leaving school are much more mercenary about education, and have much higher expectations about it now, and are not just accepting it as a privilege. Then there are the grind schools, whose job it is to squeeze every last drop of attainment out of even the most mediocre of students. Is it any wonder people are opting to extend the best days of their life into their twenties?

Anyway, to sum up this part, if British universities are finding it harder to pick out the 'brightest of the bright' then a broader system like the one I've already discussed should be put in place. It should be pointed out that studies correlating performance in universities between bac results and between A-level results showed that graduates with a mediocre bac still tended to do well at third level, whereas graduates with mediocre A-levels didn't. So there it is.

And now, onto the thickos.

I saw a documentary on TV a while back. I can't remember on what channel, but it was about the influx of Polish immigrants into Britain, and how they are addressing the skills shortage being suffered by this country at the moment. The general point being made was that Polish workers were much more reliable, skilled, knowledgeable and hardworking than their indigenous counterparts. Someone should have introduced the presenter to that stupid pharmacist I had to work with, as I since found out that she is Polish as well, but I digress.

It was pointed out some companies loved the Poles because they were willing to work hard for half-nothing. Dissenting opinions were that the companies should pay more in general, the presenter pointed out, but it was time to get realistic: If certain british based companies found they had to raise the wages of their workers too much, they would simply go elsewhere. Of course, it was easy for the presenter to say that, settled cosily in a nice comfortable job with a national television station. I wonder how he'd feel if he had to hoist around cargos of fish all day for £5.10 an hour.

Anyway, the point was made that british students leaving school after their GCSEs were turning out to be getting thicker by the year. A post-secondary technical college was finding that a lot of them lacked the basic skills of literacy and numeracy, and as quoted above, one expert in education said that it seemed that learning wasn't quite the thing to be into in school any more, if you were concerned with your trendiness quotient. The reasons for this are sure to be many and varied, although if I were to point at something and complain like an old-age pensioner, I would say that the veneration of the most inconsequential of celebritys (Preston, Chantelle, Kerry, Paris, fucking premiership footballers) in the popular media does rather send out the message that though you may be as thick as shit and have nothing to say, if you look halfway good (though not with too much character, mind), and are willing to prostitute yourself for a bit of exposure on celluloid, you don't really have to worry about having to string a sentence together as you'll succeed anyway. But maybe that's just me.

There is also the fact that a culture exists over here that where, if it turns out that you're not too intellectually gifted, the GCSEs can be a convenient drop-off point for some now, whereas in other countries, you're generally regarded as more than a bit of a loser if you leave before you final secondary school exams. So if anyone wants to start complaining about people 'coming over and taking our jobs', they would do well to do a little inward examination first.

But lastly, to return to my first point, when are people going to get that university is not about acquiring a set of skills that don't require Einstein's IQ to master? It's about education. Let the fucking corporations train up new employees in the skills they need. They can certainly afford it, and if their habit is to underpay the people that are most important to their success, they may soon find that they have no choice.