As the Trinity Education Project seeks to reimagine how students in Trinity are assessed, there is a strong chance that semesterised assessment, including Christmas exams, could be introduced, particularly as the students’ union has a mandate to advocate for them. However, the introduction of semesterised exams would be incompatible with the nature of many courses.
The structure of Trinity’s academic year is particularly short, even compared to other Irish universities. Not having exams in the first term leaves students with more time for other activities outside of the classroom, a point which former Senior Lecturer, Prof Patrick Geoghegan, has made in voicing opposition to such exams. Leaving time for such activities is essential to the way Trinity treats undergraduates, particularly arts students who often have sparse timetables and who have their degrees spread over four years as opposed to the national standard of three.
Re-examination and change of Trinity’s current structure of assessment is welcome, and so, too, is the removal of the current system whereby modules are examined months after they finish. A reduction in the amount of exams some students sit during the summer examinations period can be beneficial, especially for courses where students may sit as many as 14 exams in just two weeks.
However, while some courses have introduced Christmas exams to combat this, we should not accept that this is the only, or best, solution for all courses.
The Trinity Education Project has real potential to bring exciting, progressive forms of assessment into the university at the undergraduate level, including research projects, presentations and debates. The project should recognise that the content and aims of every course are different, and should not settle for a lazy, catch-all attempt at fixing current issues. More experimental methods have recently been embraced in some courses, including those in the School of English and the Department of History, which are moving away even from summer examinations. Many academic staff members in these departments oppose assessment via examination, for fear that it forces students to rote-learn rather than engage with the material and research methods. If a method of assessment does not improve how students learn and instead forces them to embrace what is one of the main criticisms of our second-level education system, then they should not be universally embraced at third level.
