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The nation’s largest routine school says “serious flaws” in the grading process calculated for Leaving Cert students led to nearly half of their teachers’ estimated grades being lowered.
The Institute of Education, based on Dublin’s Leeson Street, has written to the government asking it to expand the grounds for appeal for this year’s Leaving Cert students.
The institute, which claims to have the largest number of Leaving Cert students in the country, more than 800, hired expert data analysis firm Krisolis to evaluate the methodology used by the Department of Education to award grades to students.
It states that the analysis found “serious flaws” in the model used by the department that produced a “bias” against large classes.
Overall, he says, 96 percent of his students had a reduced grade and 44 percent of the estimated grades of all his teachers were lowered. This compares with a national average of 17 percent of teacher ratings that were lowered.
He says this resulted in an average 30-point drop in what students would have achieved according to their teachers’ estimates; in some cases, there was a 77 point drop.
Education Minister Norma Foley, however, has said that the calculated grading process used by the department was “blind” to school types and was applied fairly to all students.
A detailed technical report published by his department shows that teachers in some cases overestimated the proportion of students who would get the best grades by a factor of two or three times the expected level.
One in six scores ended up being downgraded under the department’s standardization process, although overall national scores were the highest on record.
However, Institute of Education director Yvonne O’Tooles said the analysis identified a “fundamental bias” in the methodology used to assign calculated grades to students.
He said institute staff members and a team of professional data analysts have spent the days since the calculated ratings were released Monday evaluating the methodology used by the department.
Ms. O’Toole said that the level of reduction, coupled with national grade inflation of 4.4 percent, will result in “hundreds of our students unfairly missing tomorrow from their chosen majors when bids are made. of the CAO. . . Our student body has been significantly penalized for the grading process.
“As a school, we have written today to the Taoiseach and its relevant ministers asking for an appeals system that allows questioning of the calculated scores given. The current appeals process is meaningless, it only allows a student to appeal an administrative error, not their grades. ”
The institute’s criticism follows requests for an investigation into how Leaving Cert results were calculated at St Kilian’s Deutsche Schule in Clonskeagh, Dublin.
The private school that specializes in teaching German expected half of its students to earn an H1 in German based on their previous performance. However, only 14 percent obtained this rating based on the calculated ratings process.
Request for ‘respectful treatment’
In a letter to the department, the school principal Alice Lynch expressed the school’s “deep concern” about the “very flawed process” applied to the calculation of German grades at the higher level of the school.
Ms. O’Toole, for her part, said that pending the outcome of the appeals, students should not lose their seats in the CAO.
“We ask that our students and others affected by failures in the computed grade model be treated with respect,” he said.
“They should not be penalized tomorrow in the CAO process because there is no redress system to take into account the flaws in the State’s methodology. To do less than put in place a redress system would be depriving these young people of the opportunities they have worked so hard for. “
He said it was the first time that the calculated ratings model had been used in Ireland.
“It has never been tested because there is no historical data to contrast. There were always going to be anomalies, but not appealing when flaws are discovered would be a sham, ”he said.
The institute contends that the department’s model of bringing larger cohorts closer to the national norm “exacerbated the negative impact” on its students.
It contends that no adjustment was made to the model used by the department to take this into account, which produced a “bias” against larger cohorts within the process.
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