Launch of Feasibility Study in Admissions
Royal Irish Academy, Dawson Street, Dublin
17:00, Monday, 14 January 2013
Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests,
First of all, I would like to thank the President of the Royal Irish Academy, Professor Luke Drury, for chairing the event this evening, and for allowing us to launch this feasibility study at our national academy. It’s the right venue, because the Academy was founded for the advancement of knowledge and for embracing “all the objects of rational enquiry”.
Tonight, in partnership with the Central Applications Office – the CAO - we launch a feasibility study which we hope will advance our knowledge about third-level admissions in this country. And which will test a new admissions route within a rigorous framework of rational enquiry. Our objective is create an opportunity to reform one of the more controversial aspects of the Irish education system.
The Minister for Education and Skills, Ruairi Quinn, rightly made third level admissions a priority on his taking office. I recall him speaking in September 2011 about the need
“to think in terms of radically new approaches and alternatives to the current arrangements”
…..while at the same time “maintaining public confidence in the integrity and fairness of any selection system.” These are the twin considerations being explored in this feasibility study.
I also remember the Minister, quoting with approval, a spokesperson from the Irish Second-Level Students’ Union who referred to the “infamous points system” and noted that [quote],
“although the [current] examination structure has elements that are fair, there must be a better way. The points race puts our young people to the pin of their collar - physically, mentally and emotionally.”
I echo this: both the relative fairness of the points system - it has the great merit of anonymity and transparency - and its drawbacks. It is too narrow a gate through which to admit students to third level because it doesn’t take into sufficient account students’ potential, nor the context in which they achieve their results.
This is an issue which has long been on my mind. Back in April 2011, a few days after my election as Provost, I gave an Irish Times interview in which I indicated that a priority of mine would be, [quote], “to move the admissions criteria beyond a purely CAO points-based system”.
I suggested that we might learn from other approaches internationally, for example in Texas where coming in the top 5 percent of your state school guarantees you automatic access to a university education. This suggestion was referenced, later in the year, in Aine Hyland’s invaluable report on ‘Entry to Higher Education in Ireland in the 21st Century’.
Many of us within the sector, coming from different standpoints, have come to the same conclusion: reform of the entry system is necessary. We may differ about how to reform, but we’re agreed about why we need to. Such consensus means that this is the right historical and psychological moment to effect change.
The wind is with us. But we must move swiftly or the moment will pass.
The impetus lies with the universities. As the Minister for Education and Skills has so often pointed out, universities control the system that is used for admission to third-level. It is administered by the CAO – and administered superbly – but the responsibility for deciding on the entry criteria are ours. Therefore change must come from us.
Trinity seeks change, some people might say, we are one of the “winners” of the points race. Every year many of our courses have the highest points requirements in the country; we therefore have the pick of students who perform best in the Leaving Certificate.
I hope that the fact that our points are high gives us moral authority when we say that we need to find a better way. In Trinity, we know we have excellent students, but we’re also aware that high overall points don’t necessarily measure aptitude for a chosen subject, and that the potential of students with different skills sets is being overlooked. We know from the success of the Trinity Access Programmes, and other national access initiatives, that there are brilliant students whose potential is not released by the Leaving Cert, but who thrive at third level when given the chance.
This is a national issue; we are not merely concerned with finding a better way for Trinity to admit its students. We seek a better, fairer way for all students to enter third level in Ireland. We’re prepared to openly test this new admissions route, and share the results with all third-level Colleges.
When he came into office, I set my new Dean of Undergraduate Studies, Dr Patrick Geoghegan, the task of looking at ways to reform admissions. He put together a working group which produced a discussion paper in February 2012. This led to an international conference on admissions in May 2012, which enjoyed contributions from both the IUA and the IOTI, as well as the advice of national and international experts. Today’s feasibility study arises directly out of all that work.
With this feasibility study, we’re asking a simple question: can we find a wider gate to admit our students, and make use of approaches that are trusted and respected internationally?
As we in Ireland look to see if there is a better, fairer mechanism for identifying and admitting students, it’s reassuring to know that we can draw upon leading international experts, so I am particularly grateful to the Dean of Admissions at Harvard, Dr William Fitzsimmons, for joining us tonight as our guest of honour. We value his advice and support, and thank him for his friendship.
But we are not trying to copy Harvard, or the American admissions system, because we are two very different countries, and things that work in one system will not necessarily work in another. But there are elements that have worked successfully internationally, and which we shouldn’t be afraid of attempting here, especially because the stakes are so high.
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This evening we are proud to be launching our feasibility study in partnership with the Central Applications Office. I do wish to emphasise how grateful I am to the General Manager of the CAO, Ivor Gleeson, for his strong support, and to Joseph O’Grady for his hard work and advice during the development of the study. The CAO is one of the most respected institutions in the country - they do a brilliant job administering the system; they never complain when caught in the crossfire of criticisms of the points race; and in working with us to develop this study we have found them both helpful and innovative.
I’m also grateful to the School of Law and the School of Histories and Humanities at Trinity, for agreeing to be part of this feasibility study. Both schools share a long commitment to increasing access, and we are delighted that they were willing to test this new admissions route as part of that commitment.
You may wonder why I keep referring to a feasibility study, rather than a pilot. It’s an important distinction. When I entered Trinity in the 1980s to study engineering, the first thing I learned was that Engineers should never be afraid of trying something new - but you should also test it first. So we will test the new admissions route in this study, running it on a very small scale, and sharing the results with the sector.
This study arises out of work across all seven Irish universities, and in co-operation with the Institutes of Technology. This is a study on behalf of the sector, with all information shared, and results published. It’s a study which is part of a larger analysis being carried out by the “IUA Task Group on Entry and Progression”, chaired by my colleague Professor Philip Nolan, the president of NUI Maynooth. We greatly look forward to the task group’s forthcoming suggestions and solutions.
Dr Patrick Geoghegan will shortly explain how the new admissions route will work in Trinity, and there’s also information on this in the programme, as well as on the Trinity website, so I won’t dwell on the specifics.
I will just note that I’m particularly pleased that the new route takes into account personal and contextual data, as well as the applicant’s performance compared to every other applicant from the school - what we call the ‘relative performance rank’. I’ve always felt that, for example, 450 points gained in one school may be a far greater measure of achievement than 550 points in another, and I’m glad that this sense of relativity is being embedded in the study.
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I don’t expect change to our national admissions system to come in the form of radical, revolutionary overhaul. It will be incremental change, but steady, progressive and significant. We are not seeking to tear up what we have, but to refine it and improve it - we acknowledge the system was important and ground-breaking in its day.
One of my predecessors as Provost, Bill Watts, played a key role in the development of the CAO, when he was the College’s Senior Lecturer back in the 1970s. He served as the CAO’s first chairman. In his memoir published in 2008, two years before his death, Watts had some amusing remarks to make about the pre-CAO admissions system. Apparently Trinity used to request references from teachers, but found that, and I quote from Dr Watts’ memoir:
“conscientious nuns always found the best in their girls”
and, Watts’ goes on:
“one Irish-speaking boys school had only one reference – buachaill ar fheabhas – an excellent boy”.
This was taken, Watts writes, as a “tongue-in-cheek testing of Trinity’s suspected linguistic incompetence.”
Such are the possible dangers, lest we forget, of third level admissions in small, intimately connected countries, with controversial pasts! Little wonder that Watts wrote: “In the course of its more than thirty year history, the CAO has contributed importantly to the equality of opportunity. Long may it flourish!”
However Watts also noted the dangers of the points system. He had sharp words to say about the prevalent idea that you mustn’t “waste your points”, and was concerned to see students, quote, “being pressed into subjects for which they have little or no taste, while actually preferring subjects in which places are more easily gained.”
Watts, one of the architects of the CAO points system, would I think, have been behind what we are trying to achieve today.
Nothing is so good that it cannot be improved.
Any system will, over time, reveal its restrictions and inefficiencies. And once such problems are identified, it’s the simple duty of those responsible to mend them.
In seeking reform, we must be ready to change what is inadequate and inequitable, and preserve what is fair and efficient. For Watts, for me, for the Minister, for most of us, the great contribution of the CAO points system to third-level admissions in Ireland was anonymity and transparency. That legacy must at all costs be preserved, and so
I’m delighted that our new proposed admissions route is also anonymous.
For the rest, for those parts that don’t work as well as they should, we must be prepared, pragmatically and energetically, to find better solutions.
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I’ll end, if I may, with a quote from Archimedes, since I’m an engineer and his words amount to an engineering principle. He said: “Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I can move the world”.
In our contemporary world, that lever is education. It’s the one thing that unlocks a person’s potential, opens up opportunity, gives a person the means to go out and fulfil their ambitions in world.
But if we limit the standing space, and if we construct only short levers that favour some over others – denying opportunity to those who could take advantage of it – well, we all lose out. We can’t keep preaching at our young people that they are the hope, the future, the creators of change - unless we give them a hand on the lever that moves the world. I believe this feasibility study is the first step towards giving them more leverage. I look forward, in excitement, to the next steps.
Thank you.
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