The leaving cert results are out today and once again there is concern about the numbers of people studying maths and science.  Low numbers and unusual results.  The result seems to be that while for most subjects, there is a bell curve in the results (i.e. a normal distribution, most people reaching something in the middle range with smaller numbers getting high marks and smaller numbers getting lower marks), for science and maths, there are (relatively) lots of high achievers and higher than expected numbers of people failing the subject.  Probably the reason for people failing is that after the junior cert, somebody thinks that want to do chemistry/physics/biology/maths and then after a year they find out that they dislike it intensely or that they cannot get to grips with it andf then they drift and then it becomes an insurmountable object.

What I think is the biggest problem is the lack of critical abilities that students have when they come to third level.  Additionally, in a link with my post yesterday about funding the third level, I think that we don’t have the resources to change the situation.

What happens increasingly in second level (it happened in my day too, so this is not a new thing) is that teachers and students try to guess the exam questions and they only study what is likely to come up.  Furthermore, they learn things off, rather than try to understand the subject.  So, for english poetry, most students don’t really have a clue what was motivating the poet and indeed it doesn’t interest them and indeed they don’t like poetry and in part this is ebcause they could never understand it.  However, many students in this category will get high marks in English poetry.  Why?  Because they bought a book that gave them a form of words that they could use in an exam.

The examiner then reads it, recognises the words from the textbook.  Knows that the student has never thought about the subject and is only regurgitating from a book.  However, they are obliged to give top marks because the answer is correct.

A former post-doc in my lab (whose birthday is today, incidentally) is working in a University in London.  every week, a group of 10 students come into his office for a tutorial where he tries to get them to think critically.  There is no textbook, no agenda, just a class of thinking.

Fantastic stuff.

This is what makes Oxford and Cambridge stand out in the world of education.  They make their students think. The students get fewer rewards for just learning essays and get more reqards for having opinions that are valid and they get higher marks for opinions that show real insight.

I don’t see Irish academic ever getting there.  Second level is not set up for it and third level is not set up for it.

Next month we will take 50,000 students into the third level sector.  Most of them are at this stage completely indoctrinated into the mantra of trying to guess what is on the exam. We won’t get them out of this over the 3/4 years of undergraduate life.  If they don’t take a post-grad course, many will leave with very little knowledge of what they studied. Many will admit that this is the case.

What is the solution? Marks for imagination.  This would work in many areas.  The question “From your understanding of Biology, design an experiment to find out whether bacteria are living in the pipes of the drinking water system in your school”.

Why will this never fly?  It is open to interpretation.  It is open to legal challenge. Those with no imaginations but with an enormous capacity for learning stuff that they sort-of understand will now feel discriminated against.  Suddenly, the odd-ball in the corner that reads strange books all the time will be the one getting the high marks.  Surely that’s not fair!!!

Anyway, today it is the day of the students getting their results and I hope they all got the marks they were hoping for.