Some 145 students were awarded the maximum 600 points, compared with 96 last year, even though the numbers sitting the exam fell.
The education minister claims the number of A1 grades is proof of a working curriculum. But while Noel Dempsey resists accusations that the Leaving Cert is being dumbed down, some teachers believe that a new crop of easier subjects, coupled with less course material in others, allows students to manipulate the system for high points.
Italian, Spanish and Japanese all produced high levels of A1s. An A1 used to be a rarity but all of the 115 students who sat honours Italian in the Leaving Cert passed, and almost one in five got A1s. Japanese, introduced to Irish schools on a pilot basis last year, generated A1s for 25% of students who sat the higher level exam in the Leaving Cert. Of the 1,000 who sat honours Spanish, just over 100 scored an A1.
The highest proportion of A1s were awarded to students of honours Russian, with 66% scoring top marks. But unlike Italian, Spanish and Japanese, Russian was the mother tongue of most of the 73 students who sat that exam.
These scores compare with the more traditional continental languages of French and German, with only 5.8% and 7.6% of students scoring A1s.
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Bridin Gilroy, the national co-ordinator of the Post-Primary Languages Initiative, said the reason so many students won high scores in Italian and Spanish was because those subjects are easier. Also, most of the 30 or so pupils who studied Japanese, studied the subject outside school hours, suggesting they were highly motivated.
“Italian and Spanish are recognised as being more accessible and easier than French and German. German is a much more difficult language, and French has more difficult pronunciations, whereas the other two are pronounced as they are written,” said Gilroy.
Micheal de Barra, the deputy principal of Coolmine Community college in Clonsilla, north Dublin, had students who sat Russian, Japanese and Spanish in this year’s Leaving Cert. “In the 1980s it was almost impossible to get high grades in Spanish, but that changed,” he said. “I think that was part of the reason why Spanish wasn’t so popular. I don’t think it’s easier, but they tend to mark it more in an equivalent fashion to French and German, whereas it used to be marked much harder.”
“Spanish has become popular in the last five years, much more popular than German or French. For many years, Spanish was the poor cousin, but now many people have houses in Spain or go on holidays there, so people are beginning to take it more seriously.”
John Morris, of the Institute of Education in Dublin, said that some courses have been shortened by almost a third, and most courses have been revised to make them more “relevant” for contemporary students.
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“The fact that the new business course is 30% shorter than the old course has to make it easier in terms of the understanding and the quantities needed for an exam grade,” he said.
“A lot of the syllabi have been revised and updated, which makes them more relevant and more manageable for students. If something is more relevant it is, by its nature, going to be more liked and therefore easier to succeed in.”
John Hurley, a former president of the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland, said: “An A in honours English was a rare species, but it is achievable now. The Leaving Cert English was revised, and there is a higher emphasis on language skills,” said Hurley, who also sat on the government’s Points Commission.
“I don’t think the exam is any easier; so what you are going to say then is, ‘Was the correcting easier?’ I don’t know. Maybe the gradual increase is down to the change in the syllabus; maybe there was a loosening of the marking; maybe someone thought an A in honours English shouldn’t be elusive.”
The A1 grades are not evenly distributed across all subjects: while only 1% of candidates achieved the score in honours art for example, almost one in five were awarded the mark in higher-level Italian.
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There were high failure rates in both honours and pass maths as well as some science subjects this year.
“More students get As and people start asking the question ‘are we dumbing it down, is it being made easier for everybody else’,” said Dempsey.
“Nobody has said the syllabus must be becoming more relevant, students are more interested in it, teachers must be doing an even better job than they have in the past, but that would appear to be what is happening. There is no deliberate dumbing-down.”