The news this week that College is planning on implementing a quota system for appointing Scholars for this year elicited nothing more than a collective eye-roll from students.
The system, proposed by Senior Lecturer Kevin Mitchell and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Common Architecture Graeme Murdock, would cap the number of students who receive Schols in each faculty. According to Mitchell and Murdock, this measure will minimise the impact of cheating and avoid the financial impact of grade inflation that will occur as a result of online exams.
In their response, Scholars captured the collective mood perfectly: such a change will “ensure only the best cheaters are elected Scholars”. By making Schols even more challenging, they are ironically incentivising students to cheat.
The argument that, without a quota, an online exam structure would “devalue the nature of scholarship” is an unconvincing one. It is difficult to shake the feeling that this proposal is purely for financial reasons.
Why, for example, is the quota only recommended for Schols exams? If there is a genuine fear that students will cheat in online exams, why is there no apparent concern for the other exams that make up a university degree?
At the beginning of October, this Editorial Board noted that proposed changes to Schols – which would replace exams with one general exam and continuous assessment – do not do enough for accessibility. A quota system would be a further regression for a set of exams that already ignore socioeconomic background, and an additional way to undermine Schols as an institution.
To make matters worse, Scholars have said that such a change would be a breach of statutes, bringing back memories of June when College attempted to deny accommodation to Dublin-based Scholars, before being forced to backtrack after it emerged that to do so would have breached statutes.
If College wants to change the way Schols is awarded – even just for this year – it needs to be more straightforward about the reasons behind it, as well as the long-term implications such changes may have.
