joeguevara wrote: » Your failing to grasp my crux. They got the grades not from teacher bias who lets face it in grinds schools get the tests before they are given (i went to one so I know) so it is completely irrelevantg that they got 100% in every test in 2 years.
joeguevara wrote: » What you fail to understand is the leaving cert normally is graded on a bell curve so that the results are always skewed.
joeguevara wrote: » All of this boils down to you don't like Micheal Martin. And the EU will be leading the Brexit negotiations which are already complete as far as the withdrawal agreement goes. For the sake of clarity, who would you prefer to be in the role
Gerry T wrote: » Thats a strawman, you avoiding the point, high achieving schools were brought down, poor achieving schools were brought up. Your latching onto the mocks, where I said 1 student received less than his mocks. You have no idea what the school in quetion did or didn't do in relation to the mocks, whether they bought in papers or wrote their own, whether they marked hard or easy. In this case the school set papers written by the teachers and no leaked before hand. You can't deny that some schools are high achieving yr on yr. That's whats being discussed. I do understand that. A hign achieving school will sit higher on the national average curve, a low achieving school at the far end. I never said if I liked or disliked the man. I said so far I think he's doing a bad job, nothing about him personally. This is not a brexit discussion, but the WA is now front and central and is not completed by any stretch of imagination. Secondly IRL played a key role in negotiating the final parts of the WA, when Johnson visited here the deadlock was broke. But lets not discuss that here.
Gerry T wrote: » I agree with most of what you say bar that last bit. If a school with a 100 LC students gave out 5h1 in maths and that was the average for the whole country per hundred students then no student was marked down or marked up from a h2. But if you went to a school where 8 students were being given a h1, and deserved it, then 3 of those students were marked down. Again if your school only gave 3h1's then 2 lucky h2 students got marked up. That's my understanding of not introducing a schools past performance into the equation. It's a simplistic view but it does seem to be ringing through when it's disadvantage schools that seem to be raving about this years results and high achieving schools complaining.
St Kilian's is a great example, they teach through German and every year get way above average compared to other schools in higher level German, usually 40- 50% of students get a h1. This would make perfect sense This year those students were marked down and only 14% got a h1. When the Govt said they would take that into account, one week before the results were due out, under Martin's watch this part of the calculation was removed.
joeguevara wrote: » There was not an error in her process. They simply totted up the marks incorrectly.
TPK wrote: » Going back to OP, my daughter was happy with her leaving cert results in 2019, had hoped to study Medicine in NUIG, but came down a few points short in her HPAT exam that year and decided to take a year out to repeat HPAT 2020. She ended up with 728 (combined HPAT & LC) , the 3 previous years were 725, 725, 726 respectively so she was justifiably confident of an offer. Then the calculated grades came into play, we were assured they would rigorously apply the bell-curve from the previous 3 years to ensure fairness. We all know where this went. Points in NUIG med went up to 728 and my daughter lost out to random selection. She has no opportunity to appeal, resit in November or combine points. Points were so badly inflated, all the extra places created were taken up by 2020 candidates, very few trickled down to the intended recipients. This is the case for anybody using points from past LC. While I have sympathy with this years cohort of students, they have an opportunity to get the grades they feel they lost out on by resitting exams in November. This will likely distort next years CAO's and i'll lay odds that 2021 LC class will be in dispute about this imbalance. The students using grades from previous years are the real losers in this debacle and i'd guess most would happily swap places with the 2020 group.
Sean.3516 wrote: » Sorry but does anybody else not think they should have just made them all do the damn exam? Seriously, the idea that it would have been impossible to socially distance with 1/6th of the student population in a school is absurd. "Oh but what about the stress and anxiety of students?" Welcome the being an adult bucko! Life is pure stress. Get used to it. And as for them missing their last few months of school, for God's sake, get the teachers off their asses and do daily Zoom classes. Stick to the full timetable but just do it online. Seriously, I'm was in university and I was getting about 5-6 online classes every day. Stop pussyfooting over the teachers and their bloody unions and demand that these people do their jobs. Kick some butts if you have to. I'm quite skeptical as to whether the majority of teachers actually give two damns about educating children.
rainbowtrout wrote: » Teachers were doing online classes, or are you just one of those keyboard warriors who likes to jump on the teacher bashing bandwagon?
rainbowtrout wrote: » Lots of students chose not to do online learning, but you'll never hear that in the media.
IgoPAP wrote: » It's difficult to overstate just how catastrophically terrible the decision was to cancel the LC exam. And even more so because of the reason they did it - to appease opportunistic students that saw a way to get their exams cancelled and fought for it with all their might.
Sean.3516 wrote: » I stand by what I said about teachers. I would say a substantial minority of teachers are actually invested in educating their students. The majority got into teaching because they wanted an easy job, a secure job, alright wages, summer holiday and the luxury of extorting the taxpayer by striking if any of these things come under threat. I did the Leaving Cert a few years ago and teaching was the most popular career option among my peers. They want the holidays and the job security. They want it because it's a free ride. Very few of them seemed interested in teaching children. The unions have converted a once noble profession into a gravy train. Sure. Nobody that age is obligated to go to school, none of them were obligated to attend online sessions. But the teacher is obligated to teach because it's their job.
Millionaire only not wrote: » Did it ever dawn on u the stress it put on students and if cancelling the exam only saved one life it was worth it .
Millionaire only not wrote: » It’s only a bloody exam get over it , repeat it if doesn’t suit u .
rainbowtrout wrote: » Plenty of people leaving teaching because it's hard to secure work, poor working conditions, and burn out and there are better opportunities for them in the private sector.
Sean.3516 wrote: » Sorry it wasn't. "If it only saves one life..." is far and away the stupidest standard by which any policy could be measured. There are LOTS of things we could do that would save WAY more than one life but we don't do them because it turns out there's a cost to everything. How many lives do you think could be saved if we banned cars? Why wouldn't we? 148 people were killed in car crashes on Irish roads last year. Presumably we could save all of them if we just banned cars right? We don't ban cars because as a society we've decided that the quality of life of the 5'000'000 people who's lives are better because they travel in cars as opposed to a horse and buggy outweighs the cost of 148 people dying. And the reality is that it's not a bad tradeoff. If having the Leaving Cert go ahead meant more people die of COVID, that wouldn't necessarily make it a bad tradeoff. Incredibly easy for you to say that when it's not your future that was on the line. All these calculated grades have done is rob students of their agency. For better or for worse, the LC is a 2 year course measured by a single exam. And the fact is that most people do most of their effective study in the final few months. Past work is not a good predictor of grades in this exam. Changing the system like that in an arbitrary and unplanned way was the worst possible option.
rainbowtrout wrote: » Teaching is anything but a gravy train. It's unfortunate that you see teaching as such, and will probably be one of those people who spend the rest of their lives bashing teachers in the comments section of various media outlets about how easy they have it and how everyone is only in it for the holidays, when the reality is far, far different. Plenty of people leaving teaching because it's hard to secure work, poor working conditions, and burn out and there are better opportunities for them in the private sector.
Mrsmum wrote: » There is one thing I notice though, almost all the teachers I know, and I have loads of them in my family, in laws and as friends, have at least one of their children, almost always the girls, who followed them into the teaching profession so I think that means it's not that terrible as jobs go, or anywhere near.
Sean.3516 wrote: » And most of those bailing out are the young ones that have recently graduated in the last few years. The market is flooded with them which is why it's hard to find a full time position. This is because it's become such a popular career option for the reasons I've outlined. Yes it's hard to get a full time position but if you do, you have the security, the holidays etc.Burnout? If a teacher is getting burnout it's probably not because of the teaching. Poor working conditions? It's a school not a meat factory.
rainbowtrout wrote: » You could say that of many professions.
Chiparus wrote: » That is hard, but I would be hopeful she would get a second/third round offer.
Imhof Tank wrote: » @ Gerry T Not sure much of what you say about “the national average” is correct. Say you have 30 students in a subject class, St Killian’s or anywhere. As far as I understand it the algorithm was based on a weighted combination of: - teacher estimated marks and class rankings; and - how that set of 30 students did in their 5 core junior cert subjects (not just German which may explain the St Killian’s case and which could have been any school, say grind school students coming from elsewhere for LC) So, say that set of 30 students scored an average of 75% across their 5 core JC subjects then that is the coefficient for those 30 students in the subject in that school, and the teacher estimates are then crushed to yield that same average of 75%, pushing the higher scorers down and the lower scorers up - moving everyone in the group towards the average point at an equal rate. Trying to read the department’s guide to the standardisation model is torture but if above is even broadly correct then rather than being judged by the national averages including DEIS school results etc, each student is being judged by reference to himself and the other 29 in his class. And if you do 6 subjects, then you are a member of 6 different class sets, working to 6 different average JC 5 core subject coefficients.
bobbyy gee wrote: » cao offershttps://m.independent.ie/irish-news/education/more-than-seven-in-10-cao-applicants-who-received-a-college-offer-have-accepted-39534046.html
rainbowtrout wrote: » Teachers were doing online classes, or are you just one of those keyboard warriors who likes to jump on the teacher bashing bandwagon? Lots of students chose not to do online learning, but you'll never hear that in the media.
