Thousands of Junior Cert students received their results earlier today, and news sources across Ireland have been reporting on the lucky few who managed to get as high as ten, eleven, even twelve A grades.
More than 55,000 school students have received the results of their Junior Certificate exams.
This year’s results are in line with those of previous years.
More than 20,000 students achieved an A in at least one subject.
As this year’s results are released, Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe has asked the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment to look at the possibility of reforming the exam.
What the media aren’t reporting, however, is that this year’s results, far from bringing hope for the future of the country, are deeply distressing.
For while this year’s results are at the same level as previous years, studies show that the difficulty of the actual exams themselves have taken a huge nosedive. Although many students have scored a large number of As, the reality is that these As are worth the equivalent of a D five years ago. So, taking the easier exams into account, students nationwide have achieved Fs on average. This means the country is full of failures.
Professor Stephen Hawking, a close friend of mine, faxed me over this chart, the culmination of several years of work for him. He has been studying closely the decline of the Junior Certificate, and I believe the following makes for shocking viewing.
Note from the chart that the difficulty of the Junior Certificate exam has been in free fall since 2000, which incidentally, is the year in which I completed the examination. This is the last year the examination was academically challenging in any real sense. According to Hawking, the students of Junior Cert 2000 were the ‘last real high achievers.’
Hawking believes that the Leaving Certificate has been suffering from the same decline in quality since June 2002, which funnily enough, is the year I completed that exam also!
That’s not to say that the students of today are dumb. There are plenty of bright young minds up and down the country. The problem is, these intelligent youngsters are too busy twittering or performing anal sex in bus stops to make any real positive impact in our society.
This weekend’s Sunday World will once again run their annual piece about teens fucking, drinking and taking drugs on Junior Cert celebration night. The piece will feature several photos of teenage girls with their knickers down, as well as some barely blurred out snaps of the saucy sex-bombs performing oral sex on their male classmates. This particular Sunday World issue is usually a bestseller, second only to their ‘Leaving Cert students fucking and putting cocaine up their bottoms‘ issue, which comes around every August.
If you just can’t wait until Sunday for your Junior Cert fix, tomorrow’s papers will have plenty of photos of all the attractive female students, from lots of different angles, again and again and again.
I sat mine in 2003! Figured you were older than that.
In my day, we had to take a horse and cart in to the school, and when we got there we were beaten severely!
Is that chart real? Is that real shit about the difficulty of the exam? I thought it was only AMERICA that had a fucked up educational system…being a grad student in education policy, if I don’t have any country to copy from, I’M GONNA HAVE TO COME UP WITH SOMETHING MYSELF…FUCK!!!
It’s real alright. We’re running out of doctors over here. You don’t even need a degree anymore, they’ll take you if you have reasonable English.
I drove around for three hours early this morning, leering at the skullified 15 year olds falling around the street. Christ, me plunker was in ribbons when I woke up this afternoon, I was pulling it that much! Long live the junior cert and long live drink driving!