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A Dublin school that focuses on teaching German has expressed shock at the lower-than-expected grades awarded to its students in this year’s Leaving Cert Calculated Grades process.
14% of Leaving Certificate students at St Kilian’s Deutsche Schule received H1 grades this year compared to 41% last year.
Schools said they expected about half of their students to receive an H1.
The fee school serves students from kindergarten through elementary and second level.
German is taught from kindergarten.
Principal Alice Lynch told RTÉ News that the “vast majority” of her students would have a strong connection to Germany, many have German parents and others would have lived in the country in the past.
The school has written to the Department of Education to consult the notes.
Ms. Lynch said the school had objective data attesting to the strength of its students in the language and supporting the 19 H1 scores given to students on the estimated grades obtained by their teachers.
In all but 6 cases, those scores were downgraded by the standardization process carried out by the Department of Education as part of the calculated scores process.
He said that most of the school’s Leaving Certificate students had taken and passed a German exam, the ‘Spracht Diploma Level 2, which was significantly more advanced than the higher level Leaving Certificate in German.
Two native German students have expressed dismay that they have not received H1 grades.
Hugo Heisterkamp and Louis Murphy have a German father. Louis Murphy told RTÉ News that as a child he spoke German before speaking English. Louis’s mother, Katrin Elzmann, told RTÉ News that she was totally shocked.
“In my opinion, you can’t speak German better than Louis,” he said. “He speaks German like a German. Nobody would know that he isn’t. So obviously it’s very disappointing.”
RTÉ News has discussed the matter with the Department of Education and is awaiting a response.
Concerns raised in Dáil due to rating inflation
Independent TD Peter Fitzpatrick has raised concerns about Leaving Certification rating inflation which he said will affect more than 20,000 CAO applicants using Leaving Cert results from prior years.
Fitzpatrick said the breakdown of the results shows that teachers overestimated their students’ grades.
Louth’s DT said this would result in a significant increase in the required points for CAO courses across the board.
He said this was unfair to students who were applying through the CAO and who had completed the certificate of completion in 2019 or earlier and said these students must be protected and given a fair chance.
In response, Taoiseach Micheál Martin said that this was a unique year due to Covid-19.
He noted that around 79.2% of the cases there was no change in grade.
The Taoiseach said it was difficult at this stage to say what challenges may arise for some of the Leaving Cert students from last year to secure places at the university.
He said that this year there will be more than 5,000 additional CAO positions at the third level designed to reduce pressure in key areas.
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