Dr. Patrick Geoghagen | Guest Contributor
When I was researching the history of the Irish admissions system, I came across a headline in The Irish Times: ‘Universities points system is less than fair’. The article was published on 25 August 1976, when I was two years old, and in the thirty-six years since then the criticisms of the points system have grown louder and louder, but no-one has been prepared to do anything about it. Until now. The feasibility study which Trinity has launched will test a new admissions route on behalf of the third-level sector, and will attempt to see if there is a fairer and a better way of admitting students to college.
The first students to be enrolled under the new scheme will walk under Front Arch for the first time in September 2014. Photo: TCD Communications
In devising this new admissions route we were careful to follow international best practice. Professor Steven Schwartz, the former Vice-Chancellor of Macquarie University in Australia, produced the groundbreaking report on fair admissions for the UK government in 2004. He agreed to speak at the international one-day conference we held in Trinity on admissions in May last year, and he endorsed the work we were doing to try and a find a better national admissions system. We quoted him at our launch: ‘The best approach is not to use a single indicator of score (such as the Leaving Certificate). It is better to use a comprehensive set of predictors in the hope that the weaknesses of one might be compensated by the strengths of another’. His advice and support proved invaluable as we worked to develop the use of three scales (or ‘predictors’) in our feasibility study. Following the launch in the Royal Irish Academy I received an email from Professor Schwartz who told me how proud he was that Trinity was showing national leadership in this area.
We also had key support from all around the world. Over the summer I visited admissions offices in some of the leading universities in the United States, and at Harvard I found solutions to many of the problems we were facing. Dr. William R. Fitzsimmons has been the Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid at Harvard since 1986, and is an internationally respected leader in this field. His advice and support proved crucial, especially in reminding us that the context in which the results were achieved also mattered. He flew to Ireland for the launch so because he believes passionately in what we are doing, and he wanted to show his public support for this attempt to bring about an historic reform of the Irish education system.
This support has been echoed elsewhere. The Minister for Education and Skills praised ‘the very innovative way’ of admitting students that we were testing, and we were also delighted by the reaction of the ASTI, the TUI, the National Association of Principals and Deputy Principals, and the representative bodies of the second and third-level students. The Labour Party even made it a headline issue on their official webpage: ‘Trinity College leads the way on admissions reform’. This success has encouraged the other Irish universities to explore the use of supplementary assessments alongside Leaving Certificate results, and our feasibility study – whether it succeeds or fails – has begun a long overdue debate about reforming the current admissions system.
Some have – and will remain – cynical about any attempts to change the existing points based system. To them I would quote from one of my favourite speeches from Abraham Lincoln, a speech that inspired me as I developed this study:
‘I do not mean to say that we are bound to follow implicitly in whatever our fathers did. To do so, would be to discard all the lights of current experience, to reject all progress, all improvement. [What I do say is – that if we would supplant the opinions and policy of our fathers in any case, we should do so upon evidence so conclusive, and argument so clear, that even their great authority – fairly considered and weighted – cannot stand.]’
That is what we are doing in this study. We are attempting to use international experiences, progress, and improvements, to see if there is a better and a fairer way, and we are doing so because we are convinced it is the right thing to do. We are prepared to fight for what we believe in, rather than abandon another generation to the cruelties of the points race.
Our greatest poet, Seamus Heaney, wrote a poem in honour of Harvard’s 350th anniversary which ended with the line: ‘The books stand open and the gates unbarred’. Trinity is Ireland’s oldest university and Harvard is America’s. We are proud that we have joined forces to ensure that for future generations of Irish students the books will be open and the gates unbarred.
Dr Patrick Geoghagen is College’s Senior Lecturer whose role is to coordinate teaching and learning and oversee admissions. Dr. Geoghagen is the architect behind TCD’s new admission scheme. Full details about the study can be found at tcd.ie/undergraduate-studies
