The Leaving Cert - equally unfair on all

Posted by TheYank at 8/17/2009 11:17 AM EDT

You may remember that a few months ago I mentioned that my daughter was doing the Leaving Cert. Well, last week she got her results and today - two full months since she did her last exam and only a few weeks before the new academic year - she found out where she will be going to college.

My daughter has been working for the summer in the Wal-mart in the town where I grew up and she's made a few friends there. The friends are all around her age and quite a few are at the same stage of their academic careers: that is, just finished high school and heading to college shortly. Needless to say her friends have been fascinated to learn about the Irish system.

These kids have had the usual American experience of getting marks along the way, doing the SAT (probably more than once), applying to colleges, getting accepted/rejected and finally settling on a place for the fall. This they all had done by, what?, April? Earlier? I don't really know, but I do know that all of them have been horrified on my daughter's behalf at the thought of having to wait so long to find out (a) if she had a place in college at all and (b) where she would be going.

Everything about this system stinks. Yeah, I know. I've heard all the arguments about how fair the Irish system is, but it isn't fair.

It's not fair on any 18-year-old to expect them to accept having to wait so long wondering what shape the next stage of their life will take. It's not fair on those students who wanted to study English in college to learn that they now cannot because they failed one three hour math test after 12-years of passing and now face having to put college on hold for a full year in order to take the whole set of exams again (this does happen). It's not fair to the kid who is hoping to study such-and-such in Galway that he/she has to wait til now to learn that they now have to choose between a completely different course in a different university in a different city or they too can "repeat" final year.

Today my daughter is both excited and relieved (probably not in that order), but there is no good reason why she shouldn't have had a better idea of where she was going long before today.