Professor Áine Hyland:

There are a number of points there. Being pragmatic about the point regarding teachers not assessing their own students for certification purposes, that has been an embedded attitude among teachers. I take the point Professor O'Leary made that things may be changing now and that would be the ideal. I am more concerned to see something happening rather having what I have seen over the past 40 years or so.

I would have some concerns about a full decoupling of the leaving certificate from higher education. I have experience of the University of California system as I have two grandchildren in that university. They had to submit 14 separate pieces of evidence in their applications. We talk about stress but the leaving certificate is nothing compared to that. They had to submit all kinds of things like a video of their last football match or a tape recording of a music performance. There are so many pieces being taken into account. It is well-intentioned as it is an attempt to see the full child in a holistic way but it is very stressful for the students and totally difficult for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. That is my reservation.

At the time of the points commission there were a group of us who fully favoured what has been mentioned here today, namely, the lottery system. In other words, students would need to meet a certain minimum requirement for the programme that they are applying for and then all those names would go into a hat and there would be a lottery. We got no national or political support for that idea. The national lottery system did not wash. There is a section about it in that report because it would solve many of the problems we are talking about.

As many of us have mentioned, there are really only a relatively small number of courses in third level that are driving the stress and are the high points courses, as they are now referred to. We looked at that and made suggestions that some of those could become graduate courses, rather than undergraduate courses, as is the case in some other countries. For example, that could apply to medicine and law and so on and all the students would go into a much more generic first year courses. We would then be close enough to the French system. However, the French system is a bit different because they have selection at the end of first and second year. The question is whether we are happy that our professors, who may have a vested interest, are selecting at that point. There is another issue there. There is no perfect solution.