Despite concerns raised by some schools, College is to dramatically alter its criteria for awarding the gold medal to graduating students, as the Trinity Education Project brings changes to the structure of degree courses.
The medal – the most most prestigious undergraduate award that Trinity has to offer – will now be given to students who obtain an overall score of 75 per cent or higher in their final exams, to facilitate the decentralised nature of degree programmes under the Trinity Education Project. In courses involving a major and minor component, the same criteria will apply, and students will be expected to achieve a minimum of 70 per cent in each named component of their degree in order to be eligible.
Some schools, specifically law, dental science and medicine, have raised objections to the plans, arguing that the 75 per cent cut-off point will pose too high a bar for students. In response, law and dental science schools will be encouraged to adjust their approach to marking exams in line with the new criteria.
Speaking to The University Times, Senior Lecturer Kevin Mitchell said medicine, which will continue to use the old criteria for awarding gold medals, was a “special case”. Medicine exams are regularly marked by external correctors, making it more difficult to adjust the marking criteria and implement the changes.
The new criteria for the awarding of gold medals were initially planned to include the results of reassessment or supplemental exams, but senior College officials expressed concerns that this would encourage students to split their work between two sets of exams in the hope of achieving a higher grade, creating a “moral hazard” for students. As a result, only results from initial sittings of exams will be considered when schools are awarding gold medals.
Previously, the medal was given to students who achieved over 70 per cent in their final exams, based on criteria that varied between schools and courses. In most instances, students were required to achieve a grade between 73 per cent and the recognised upper limit of 75 per cent. All in all, eight different sets of criteria were used across schools to decide if students were eligible for the award.
The changes, which were proposed by Mitchell in consultation with a Trinity Education Project subgroup, received endorsement from the University Council in April.
Speaking to The University Times, Mitchell explained the rationale behind the changes: “Under the Trinity Education Project, students will migrate through in a way that they’re picking their own channel, they’re picking their own courses and specialisations along the way and they’re taking some modules here and some modules there, so an individual course doesn’t have as much oversight of everything that a student has done educationally, even in their last couple of years potentially, as they have done in the past.”
“It’s a different way of calculating or estimating whether a student has reached a certain pinnacle because they might have taken a module outside of that particular course, and so what we wanted to do was just simplify that down as much as we could”, he said.
