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THE USE OF technology in public administration is part of the wider digitalisation of the administrative state. Processes of the state are moving online and into code. This is not a new phenomenon.
However, the coding errors in the Leaving Certificate calculated grades process reinforce the importance of ensuring transparency and openness are incorporated into the use of technology employed by the government.
Despite the growing role of technology, Government is still very much a human endeavour. The human consequences of the coding errors are being felt by Leaving Certificate students and their support networks.
There are also consequences across the educational sector including for third-level institution resourcing and the points system operated by the Central Applications Office.
If there is to trust in public administration, our politicians and civil servants need to be frank regarding the role of automated processes.
There can be no question of hiding behind machines or outsourcing agreements. In moving government processes online or into code, there needs to be a commitment to transparency and openness in the relationship between individuals and the state.
Mistakes happen but when they do there needs to be a culture of clear and swift communication of what went wrong, how the matter is going to be resolved and steps being taken to ensure similar mistakes do not happen again.
What is coding?
As noted above, Government is a human endeavour and so is coding. Code is how a programmer tells a computer what to do, much the same as we use speech or text to communicate with each other.
There are many programming languages that a programmer can use, much like there are many languages spoken across the globe. Regardless of which programming language is being used, code comes down to the same thing: a series of commands that the computer follows to implement a process.
If those commands are incorrect, the computer doesn’t know that; it just implements a process incorrectly. This happens frequently, and programming largely consists of tracking down these errors and fixing them. Occasionally one will slip through.
The consequences of such an error could be as minor as a broken link on a website, but as code becomes increasingly integral to every facet of public administration, an error can have a significant negative impact on a large number of individuals. That is exactly what happened in implementing the Leaving Certificate calculated grades process.
What went wrong?
The Leaving Certificate calculated grades process was designed to ensure that students are graded fairly throughout the country. The question could be raised as to why this isn’t left to the teachers and schools; the people best placed to give accurate estimates of a student’s likely performance in an exam.
The answer is that teachers are extremely good at estimating the relative ability of the students in their class, but a report by the National Standardisation Group notes that “it is more difficult for teachers to align their estimates accurately with the judgements of other teachers in other schools and with an external national standard”.
In order to account for this factor, the Leaving Certificate calculated grades process made use of Junior Certificate results data to standardise the Leaving Certificate results nationally.
At the time of writing, three errors have been found in the code written to implement the Leaving Certificate calculated grades process. The first error, which was reported by the contractor, caused students’ Junior Certificate results in the core subjects (English, Irish and Maths), along with their weakest two other subjects, to be included in the data used by the process.
However, it was intended that their core subject results would be used together with their strongest two other subjects. The second error was that students’ results in CSPE were not removed from the data used by the model when they should have been excluded.
The third and most recently discovered error was that cases, where a student had no result in one of their core subjects, were not treated in the correct manner. These errors should have been noticed during code review, a quality assurance practice where the code is examined by a programmer who was not involved in writing it.
What can we learn from the coding errors?
There is a need for transparency in the automated processes of government. There is significant frustration with the Department’s week-long delay in announcing the coding errors. The Department had the opportunity to develop a more open and transparent relationship with individuals but may have instead contributed to a further erosion of trust between individuals and the state.
Education Testing Services (ETS) was contracted by the Department “to provide an independent expert opinion on the adequacy of the coding”. The review was limited to “an audit of a sampling of the coding rather than a full audit of the entire coding”. To ensure there is full transparency and trust in the process, we recommend a complete review of the code.
We call on the Minister for Education Norma Foley to publish correspondence between the Department and the original contractor in relation to code review to ensure there is transparency in relation to the roles played by different actors involved in the calculated grades process.
Using code to automate tasks on behalf of the state is a practice that will only grow more prevalent. We need now to learn from the mistakes of the Leaving Certificate calculated grades process and work to develop an open and transparent digital administrative state that people understand and trust.
Aisling Ryan is a PhD student in administrative law at the School of Law, UCC. Pierce Ryan is a PhD student in applied mathematics at the School of Mathematical Sciences, UCC.
He’s full of shįte, that’s a five cent coin.
U should go to Speechsavers.
Most people imagine that evolution began with Darwin but all Darwin did was introduce a speculative cause for evolution and the calamitous survival of the fittest as a ‘law of nature’ which includes the curtailing of savage populations through famine (it came about 15 years after the Great Famine so we get included as a less favorable race ).
Evolutionary biology began with evolutionary geology by an Catholic Archbishop Nicolas Steno who actually drew the conclusion from shark’s teeth found in rock strata far removed from the sea -
http://academic.emporia.edu/aberjame/histgeol/steno/steno.htm
It progressed through William Smith who showed older rock contained more simpler lifeforms and newer rock more complex forms -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Smith_(geologist)
The old ideas of a global flood came from observing that marine fossils were found on mountaintops and the ancient authors wove narratives around these observations such as Gilgamesh or Noah’s flood .
Mention evolution and Darwin’s picture comes up but this is an accident of empirical propaganda normally directed against the Biblical texts however a more expansive view generally puts it all right.
@Gerald Kelleher: Darwin spelt it out to the world scientifically very well. That is why he would be more famous than earlier understandings. Anyway at this point what does it matter?
@Gerald Kelleher: And it was Darwins cousin, Galton, who turned ‘survival of the fittest’ to mean a treatise on eugenics.
@Séamus Longshanks: The Southern rednecks in the States could live with the idea that negroes were yard apes, what they couldn’t live with was that their white skins were linked to monkeys with negroes forming a level closer to monkeys then they were.
“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.” Darwin 1871
You will never,ever understand the rationale behind the mass extermination in WWII without the awful attempt to insert a cause into evolutionary biology which was cause neutral up to then .
” A lopsided education has helped to encourage that illusion. Man must realize that a fundamental law of necessity reigns throughout the whole realm of Nature and that his existence is subject to the law of eternal struggle and strife. He will then feel that there cannot be a separate law for mankind in a world in which planets and suns follow their orbits, where moons and planets trace their destined paths, where the strong are always the masters of the weak and where those subject to such laws must obey them or be destroyed.” Hitler
I am full sure that more than a few can see the academic whitewash on evolutionary biology and no ’cause’ is required to explain evolution as a ‘law’ or anything else.
@Gerald Kelleher: if you really want to be thorough, then you should mention the first musings on evolution which was in 600BC by the Greeks, also medieval Islamic scholars posited the idea of survival of the fittest. However as per the previous poster, it is all irrelevant. Lamarck was the first to actually create the evolution hypothesis with his transmutation theory but Darwin did expand on all that went before and consolidated the idea of a tree of life which is truly the modern theory we accept today.
@John B: I trust the reader to spot that they replaced negroes in Darwin’s original proposal with Neanderthals to make it fit for contemporary consumption. What a bunch of academic thugs who take no responsibility for how that ‘law of nature’ played out in the gas chambers !.
The full title is not ‘On the origin of the species’ it is the “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”.
I am delighted that a few readers have enough sense to make the distinction be they ever so silent.
Nicely said. Also this Weltenschauung allowed both the Afircan people enslaved in America and German people who were Jewish to be renders “socially dead” I.e nasally alienated, violently dominated, and generally dishonoured.
From that point, the “I-It” relationship was established between one group of humanity and another, with PRediCtable outcomes for the latter.
@Gerald Kelleher: if I posted this comment my wife would say it was too long.
@Sean: Here you go Sean, let me show you your Irish place in the academic world using images in case your small brain can’t handle two sentences -
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Scientific_racism_irish.jpg
For those who can go beyond two sentences, this is unfinished business. At least a few here are aware that when they hear those pseudo-
authoritative upper class English accents of Farage or Dawkins that sometimes there is trouble.
Ireland was close to the equator? That must have been nice. Though probably not so good for the spuds.
With a coat hanger beside it
And to think our Galaxy has made only one revolution/spin in that time.
The second last paragraph doesn’t make sense (“The main fossils we find in these rocks, there’s not a huge diversity of them so it’s always been interpreted as a very difficult environment so finding a shark tooth, especially one that size, that’s quite a large shark. It tells us that there was a lot going on that there was a wider diversity than we previously thought.”)
@Tom Sheridan: could do with some more punctuation alright.
The church is cool about this discovery.
An apex predator of 70cm ???
@Catherine O’Connor: Was wondering about that myself.
Mini-Megalodons. leprechaun sharks. Figures. We’d never get the big ones.
It is commonly misquoted as being ‘the survival of the fittest’ whereas in fact it is the ‘survival of the species that are most adaptable to change’
Also known as those most able to pass on their genes successfully yea unto the nth generation (but on behalf of all parents today here’s hoping that’s at least as far as FTL travel after that it’s a lottery). We’ve come a long way in 200,000 years only, even 8,000,000 since separating from common chimp ancestors, and in 14 billion years of the Universe existing you’d imagine a Very Large Number of civilisations like ours arose – purely on the mathematical odds – but hit the Big Filter and extinguished themselves thru uncontrolled technology. If as a species we could survive from now to development of some space folding version of the Enterprise warp speed would be where we hit infinity and beyond. Like to think some posterity might be there then. Must ease up on the popular science bukes.
Don’t think that shark would have stood a chance if “Dusty the dolphin” was around back then.
@Al coholic:
Or Davy Fitz doing a wobbly.
Lol…. call the media quick. Are you serious.
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