Archive for Examination Boards

Moving On

Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags , , , , , , , on August 22, 2025 by telescoper

Last week I wrote a post about the loose ends of the academic year, one of which concerned my PhD student Aoibhinn, who passed her viva voce examination way back in May, who had to submit a bound copy of the thesis to the relevant office by September 6th so that her degree could be ratified by Faculty and Academic Council. She has now done that, and in the process kindly made me an extra copy of the Authorized Version to put on my shelf:

It will be easy to find on my shelf because it’s a different colour from the others. Aoibhinn will be off to Germany for a postdoctoral fellowship after her conferring ceremony in October.

In subsequent post I mentioned a plethora of meetings to take place this week, all of which went off without much incident. The various Departmental Examination Boards did their business and students will receive their results on September 5th. Students involved in these will be moving on in various ways: some will be graduating, some progressing to the next year of their course and others – though not very many at all – will be leaving without qualifying.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Ireland, students in the Class of 25 have today been receiving their school Leaving Certificate results. As expected, the proportion at the highest grade (H1) is down significantly compared 2024. On the other hand, the total number of students taking  Leaving Certificate examinations is significantly higher  than last year. You can find all the national statistics here.

How these nationwide effects  will work their way through to undergraduate admissions at Maynooth remains to be seen. Applicants will get offers through the CAO system next week; the points required by each higher education institution should be available online on Wednesday 27th. The Irish Times traditionally publishes a pull-out supplement showing all the offers for all courses at all universities across the sector the following day, i.e. on Thursday 28th September.

By the end of next week, therefore, we’ll have some sort of an idea how many students we will have entering the University in September 2025 and can begin moving on to the next academic year. One thing I’ve already got sorted out – way ahead of previous years – is my teaching timetable for Semester 1. Usually I’ve been happy if I had this before the first week of term! My new timetable makes Tuesdays and Thursdays my heaviest teaching days, but gives me Wednesday free for research and other things that I’ve started planning already.

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School for Scandal

Posted in Education with tags , , , , on December 10, 2011 by telescoper

One of the biggest news stories this week derived from an investigation by the Daily Telegraph into the behaviour of officials connected with the Welsh examination board WJEC who, it appears, have been passing on tips about the content of their examination papers to teachers who have paid to attend their seminars. Of course this reflects very badly on Wales – especially coming so soon after the University of Wales scandals – but it is symptomatic of a much wider malaise;  this  episode  undermines not just the examination process  but  the entire education system in the United Kingdom. The sad thing is that that there’s not really anything new in this story.  It’s been obvious for some time that the whole framework  has become corrupted by the profit motive. There have been previous warnings about how the examination boards compete for customers (and cash) by dumbing down examination papers, but nothing seems to have been done.

The problem is particularly acute for A-level examinations, which universities use to select applicants for admission onto courses. In my own subject, Physics, the A-level course being taught in schools are clearly not fit for this purpose – the syllabuses have been filleted of any challenging material and there’s no correlation that I can discern between high grades at A-level and good performance at undergraduate level. In fact,some of our very best students at Cardiff – who are as good as any I’ve come across anywhere –  came in with very modest A-level grades but have performed brilliantly on the course. Relying only on A-levels might have led to us closing the door on these folks. Actually, I don’t know why we bother making offers based on A-level results at all!

Anyway, it’s clearly time to sort out the examinations system properly. The Exam Boards won’t fix the problem themselves because they are doing very nicely out of the status quo, so what should be done?

I like the suggestion is that the Examination Boards should be scrapped and the business of setting examinations should be carried out by one organization: no competition means no temptation to cheat. I’d also add that, at least for A-levels, the people who set and mark the examinations should be based in universities. I’d envisage a series of national subject panels with representatives from a number of institutions. A single Exam Board with members based in the university sector would also help simplify the process of university admissions, perhaps even streamlining it enough to allow  for post-examination applications without having to have earlier examinations. Above all it would ensure that A-level courses are relevant to university entrance requirements, which they are not at the moment.

Another possibility – which also like but which is probably politically a non-starter – is to scrap our tarnished A-levels altogether and adopt the International Baccalaureate as the UK’s educational gold-standard. The reason this wouldn’t be acceptable to our Lords and Masters in Whitehall is that it would immediately dispel the comforting myth that  standards in British schools are  rising;  I’d bet my bottom dollar that, relative to the rest of the world, they are not and adopting the IB would demonstrate that as it would allow comparisons to be made which can’t be made with A-levels.

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