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Youth Voice: Is this the end of the current CAO points system?
Leaving Cert result season can be a time of elation if you get the points you need and the course you want. This year, due to certain drastic happenings involving CAO points and college courses, a damn sight more people were elated than usual, with numerous course requirements dropping by 50 points or even 100 points in some cases.
Now I have no problem with that, but it does leave people who missed out on their chosen course or even repeated because they didn’t hit much higher points, feeling rightly aggrieved. So does this spell the end of the current CAO points system?
It would certainly look like it. Of course it would be silly to abandon the system just because of one unprecedented slump that’s inter-connected with student numbers, but this catalyst has made other problems with the system more visible: It’s pretty one dimensional in so much as it only looks at a candidate’s collective points scored, and while that has some benefits in terms of anonymity and such like, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the most capable candidates get the course they deserve to be in, for instance, is there much correlation between getting an A1 in French or Geography and being good at medicine?
Now that demand for courses is nearly rendering the current points system vacant, are there any other better ways of distributing college courses? Perhaps a middle ground between the Irish CAO and the British UCAS system might work well.
In Britain, personal information is required in the college application, including a small personal essay at the end. Such a reform may be a more adequate system of giving out places, as the current way of judging candidates based on 7 one-off exams, in which any number of things can go wrong, creates a considerable blind spot in the whole process.
It would be arguably fairer if there was a sense of personality incorporated into the application, where at least if a student didn’t get the points they expected, they wouldn’t be immediately left out in the cold and could rely on a good application as a back up of some sort. It’s high time that extra-curricular activities, be they sporting, volunteering or otherwise, formed some part of the college application system.
Of course, such a reform of points/ selection would also require tinkering with the Leaving Cert itself, but this wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. At the moment, it’s geared too much towards points, meaning the Leaving becomes a game of recall and regurgitation, where doing well in exams often supersedes actual learning and thinking on your feet.
Although syllabi are being changed in some subjects, others still rely a lot on off-by-heart learning, which isn’t ideal. Maybe it’s time to raise that old chestnut of continuous assessment again, in a minor capacity at least, to do consistently good workers justice come exam time.
Another idea that could be beneficial is the option to specialise in certain subjects, which would then count for more points come August. For instance, someone who’s interested in pursuing Science as a career could take biology, physics and maths as their specialties along with their other subjects, so the subjects they intend to study further are more important than the subjects they might be weaker at, which would then help their case come offers time.
There’s a lot of pressure, most of it undue, on students during their Leaving Cert year regarding CAO applications. Maybe it’s time to innovate the whole process so as to mirror the vast opportunities available once a student leaves their school exam hall behind.
By: Paddy Duffy
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