​The Arcade of Assessment: Playing Rigged Games in the Leaving Cert

A tentative reflection on opacity, agency, and control

First Impressions
I write this tentatively, as someone just beginning to explore the Irish education system. No doubt I am overlooking central issues and perhaps misinterpreting others. Yet, with fresh eyes, specific patterns stand out, especially when I compare the Leaving Certificate to the International Baccalaureate Diploma, which I am more familiar with.
The more I think about it, the more assessment systems resemble arcades. Students queue up, coins in hand, and step into brightly lit machines with explicit promises: if you play well enough, you will win. Parents and teachers stand around, watching anxiously and willing them on. But as anyone who has ever played an arcade claw machine knows, the rules are rarely as fixed or as fair as they appear. The claw is weak, the odds are stacked, and most players leave with little to show for their effort. The spectacle keeps running because the illusion of fairness is convincing — and because there is always someone making a profit, though not the players themselves.

Opacity and Gatekeeping
The Leaving Cert, on the surface, offers a clear pathway: perform well in your terminal examinations, and the CAO ladder will reward you with progression into higher education. It looks like a fair game. But pull back the curtain and the rules are far murkier. Students — and often their teachers — are left in considerable uncertainty about how marks are actually derived. Marking schemes are broad to the point of vagueness, and examiner conversations behind closed doors often decide borderline cases; substantial discretion lies with those holding the marking pen.
Here, the metaphor of the arcade becomes especially apt. Students play earnestly, convinced that the controls respond to their skill, while in truth the odds are carefully managed elsewhere. The system rewards a few, but it does so in a way that maintains the spectacle, rather than by opening genuine opportunity to all. Harsh though this may sound, the mathematics of grade distributions, especially when filtered through shifting political agendas and post-marking adjustments, suggest that the game is less about merit than about maintaining the credibility of the arcade itself.
Seen through this lens, the Leaving Cert exemplifies what Bourdieu might call the reproduction of stratification: the forms of capital most valued are docility, memorisation, and a knack for anticipating what the examiner expects. Those who can master the game’s hidden codes advance, while others are left as proof that the system is “rigorous.” The divide between those who set the rules and those who play them could scarcely be more apparent.

The Illusion of Alternatives
International alternatives such as the IB Diploma are sometimes held up as more transparent or student-centred. Indeed, the IB publishes its rubrics openly and distributes marks across coursework, essays, and oral tasks. In theory, this creates more agency. In practice, however, the syllabi are so content-heavy that inquiry often collapses into a formula. Schools under pressure to deliver results quickly discover that students succeed by following the safe paths — producing essays and projects that replicate past models rather than taking intellectual risks.
If the Leaving Cert is an arcade with opaque rules, the IB is another machine in the same hall: the lighting is different, the game looks more sophisticated, but the principle is unchanged. Someone is profiting — reputationally or financially — from the illusion of fairness. Students may feel they have more levers to pull, but the outcome remains tightly managed, and the real agency lies not with the players but with the designers.

The Irony of Coverage
Both systems ultimately lead to the same irony. They present themselves as games of skill, but the pressure of content coverage and the weight of terminal assessment leave little space for exploration.
In the IB, Theory of Knowledge and the Extended Essay should encourage independent thinking. In reality, they are too often folded into the same cycle of deadlines, templates, and coached answers. Long holidays in many international schools — three weeks at Christmas and ten in summer — compress the year further, making it even harder to focus on inquiry.
In the Leaving Cert, the bind is no less tight. Vast content requirements, rigid exam structures, and nearly three months of summer break mean that the need for comprehensive coverage drives both students and teachers. Only two year groups — Third and Sixth Year — sit external state examinations, yet the calendar of the entire system revolves around their demands. Whether this pattern reflects agricultural legacies or the logistical needs of mass marking, the effect is the same: schooling becomes about delivery, not dialogue.
Both games, then, demand performance under conditions that prioritise coverage and compliance. Both create the spectacle of opportunity. And in both, the arcade profits from keeping players hooked, not from enabling them all to win.

A Foucauldian Reflection
This leaves me with one further consideration, shaped by my training in Foucault. These educational “games” have been played for so long that I wonder whether the participants are even conscious of the panopticon they have collectively generated, with its structures of surveillance and normalisation. More troubling still, there seems to be a kind of myopia at work: a deep investment in the very discourses that sustain the arcade, such that their constructed and contingent nature is no longer visible. What is presented as natural, inevitable, and “real” may in fact be the outcome of historical choices and institutional logics.

And so I return to the arcade. The lights flash, the machines whirr, and the players line up, believing their skill alone will determine the outcome. Yet the real power lies not with the players but with the designers — those who decide how strong the claw is, how often it will grip, and how the prizes are distributed. Students continue to play because they must. Parents and teachers continue to encourage them because the arcade is the only hall in town. But someone is consistently profiting, and it is rarely those who put in the coins.

アイルランドのリービングサートとIBを比較し、試験制度を「アーケードゲーム」に喩えて考察。公平に見えて実は不透明で、従順さと暗記を報酬し、真の探究よりも外的評価を優先する構造を批判する。

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