This morning I sought permission to raise on the Adjournment the following matter: the effects of Rule 10 (2) of the Department's rules and programme for the day national certificate examination. This must be one of these occasions when the Minister comes in wondering what the question is all about. I asked for permission to raise this matter because I believe the major effects of the rule in question to be twofold, that in both cases they are bad and that something should be done about changing them. I intend to illustrate my point by quoting from the rules and from a number of Dáil questions that were answered by the Minister within the past few days. Rule 10 (2) provides that in Irish one-third of the marks are allocated to an oral test and that two-thirds are allocated to a written test, that a candidate will be required to obtain at least 30 per cent in the oral test to qualify for an overall grade of D in the subject or for a higher grade and that a candidate who obtains less than 30 per cent in the oral test will not be awarded a grade in the subject irrespective of the marks obtained in the written test.
The effect of this rule can be stated simply. It is that regardless of how well a candidate fares in the written section of the examination, he will not receive any grade unless he achieves at least 30 per cent in the oral part of the examination. On 25 March I asked the Minister for Education if he would give details of the system used for marking the group certificate examination in Irish, both oral and written. In his reply the Minister informed me that:
In Irish one-third of the marks is allotted to one oral test and two-thirds to a written test. A candidate is required to obtain at least 30 per cent in the oral test to qualify for an overall grade of D in the subject or for a higher grade; a candidate who obtains less than 30 per cent in the oral test is not awarded a grade in the subject; irrespective of the marks obtained in the written test. The detailed instructions to markers of the written test and to the examiners in the oral test are confidential.
On the same day I asked the Minister for details of the number of students who took the group certificate examination in Irish last year but who were not awarded any grade. He told me that 12,422 candidates sat for the day vocational group examination in 1979 and that of these 831 were not awarded any grade. When we look at the marking schemes for this examination we discover that no grade is awarded to a student whose percentage range for the examination is less than 10 per cent and that no grade is awarded either to a student who may have got 40, 50 or 60 per cent in the written section of this examination but who has failed to get at least 30 per cent in the oral part of the examination. It is not clear from the reply given by the Minister—though this is for the obvious reason that I did not frame the question in that way—as to how many of the students who were not awarded any grade in Irish in the group certificate examination met this fate because of their failure in the oral section of the examination or how many were in this position simply because they failed the examination as a whole, getting less than 10 per cent in both oral and written combined. It is fair to assume that anybody who got less than 10 per cent in the written part of the examination would not do well either in the oral part.
The significance of this is that failure in this one part of the subject can mean that a student who is otherwise perhaps quite good at the language will fail to get a grade at all. The consequence of this for students who sit for this examination especially can be very serious because they are required to have, for apprenticeships, a certain number of subjects. Therefore it follows logically that if they fail to get a minimum of 30 per cent at the oral part of this examination, whatever chance they may have of getting Irish as a subject for their group certificate, for apprenticeship purposes, has been totally obliterated. I would argue that this is, firstly, unfair and, secondly, anti-educational. It is unfair in the sense that it discriminates against group certificate pupils in a situation in which, for instance, intermediate certificate pupils do not have the same restrictions placed on them by way of an oral examination. In relation to oral examinations in general I would be at one with the Minister on their importance, in relation to spoken languages generally and to the Irish language in particular. But I feel that to carry it to this length, at a time when the essential Irish requirement has been abolished by and large from the examination system, is a relic of the past at which we should look again.
I have said also that I regard it as being, to some extent, anti-educational, and more particularly anti-Irish because if we want to encourage the spread and growth of the Irish language; if we want to encourage the study of the Irish language in our schools in general, and in our vocational schools in particular—which are the schools most closely affected by this—we should not be maintaining in force a regulation which, in the way in which it is being administered, will tend to suggest to pupils that if they have the option between Irish and another subject, they would be safer choosing the other subject rather than Irish. I know the Minister, and indeed the Minister of State, would not want this to happen but I put it to him that the objective way in which the system is working makes it far more likely that this will happen than that it will not. In a non-party way—because the Irish requirement generally was removed under the last administration, and I suspect that this was simply an oversight at the time—I would ask the Minister to reexamine the situation with a view to its discriminatory effect and the possible bad effects it has on the degree to which students in our vocational schools, studying for group examination cer tificates in particular will be encouraged to take Irish as a subject. This is without prejudice to the overall importance of the oral language in examinations. Indeed I would accept that the number of pupils who fail to get a grade because of the failure to get a minimum of 30 per cent at the oral is probably fairly small. But that, in a sense, sharpens the point I am making. I would appeal to the Minister to reconsider the situation, to adopt an attitude, and to redraft the rule so that pupils for this examination will be awarded a grade on the basis of their real marks in that examination, however apportioned between oral and written, but not on the basis that they absolutely have to achieve a certain level in either part of the examination.
