Professor Áine Hyland:

I am happy to come in on those questions. On the question of students self-assessing, they do it already in the primary schools. Anyone here who has children or grandchildren at that level, will know that the primary schools always ask them to self-assess. It is on the report card and I always read it with interest. How that kind of assessment would be incorporated would be different beyond that level. I have used that method in group work at third level. It is tricky to do, and not easy to incorporate into a final mark. It can be done, though, where there are smallish groups and it is possible to engage with them. It would, though, be more difficult to do it in a national public examination.

Turning to third level education, I chaired the points commission and 22 years ago we made a recommendation, very similar to what Senator Mullen suggested, that there should be much less granularisation in first year. In other words, the suggestion was that students should apply in a more macro sense to macro courses. If that happened, the points would not be as they are now, in the sense of being so competitive. I do not want to go into explaining that aspect, but that recommendation was made 22 years ago. It was not picked up. It is for the higher education institutions themselves to decide on entry under legislation, of course. It is not a matter for the Government, surprising as that might seem. Under the Universities Act 1997, decisions on selection are entirely a matter for the higher education institutions.

I come from the generation where matriculation examinations were run by the National University of Ireland, NUI, and Trinity College Dublin, TCD. I would hate to go back to that situation because it meant that leaving certificate students then had to prepare themselves for three separate examinations: the leaving certificate, NUI matriculation and TCD matriculation. To be honest, the NUI and TCD matriculation examinations were totally arbitrary. There were no syllabuses and the professors used whatever they wanted.