President of Bermuda College Dr. Michael Orenduff has announced new targets for academic achievement after revealing that almost half of students failed their autumn term last year.

He said the poor figures were proof enough that the college, and the Island, had a long way to go before anyone should be satisfied with the level of success of students. The president said next year he wanted to see 70 percent of students get pass grades for the fall semester, and said every year after that he wanted to see improvements.

He said the international norm was about 22 percent failure for semester grades.

And he said in just the few months he has been in Bermuda since joining the college in July this year, he had noticed a number of school pupils were graduating with grades that were above their actual level of ability.

Dr. Orenduff said a number of students lacked motivation, and others felt out of their depth, so simply gave up. But he said the aim of the college was to "save" as many young people as possible and transform them from failing students into successful students. He said: "We have a long way to go at Bermuda College to reach the goal of setting students on the path to success.

"Last year - fall term of 2000 - 46 percent of all the grades that were given were failures. I don't think that's acceptable.

"I think there are many reasons for that and it is not all the students' fault. It's not the fact that 46 percent of students in the classes could not do the work, or did not try. Of course, some did not try, and, of course, some did not go to class. That's the world we live in.

"But the fact is that we have been too orientated towards being a gatekeeper - towards giving lectures and hoping people pick it up. We need to move away from gatekeeping to teaching students."

Speaking to members of the English Speaking Union last week, Dr. Orenduff said measures needed to be taken both at the college and in schools to ensure children did not fail, otherwise the whole Island would fail.

He added: "Yes, the students we get, in many cases, are not prepared. We have to work with them and we have get them prepared. We can't send them back to the secondary schools - there is no going back.

"We have to offer them developmental work, if that's what it takes to get them where they ought to be. The students are granted entry (to the college) on the basis of the certificate they receive from the high schools and grades that they achieve.

"But unfortunately, what we have discovered is that these are not reliable indicators of the level of their education.

"Thus, we may admit a student, for instance, in my field of math. He may have taken a math course and achieved a certain grade, but we find that despite the fact that he has achieved say a B grade, he cannot work the problems that you would think he could work."

He said it was only after students had been tested at the college that their true ability came to light. And Dr. Orenduff said a lack of motivation was a problem, so attempts were being made at the college to ensure that students were encouraged to work hard and made to feel as though people cared about them.

He said he believed that some students simply did not attend classes or failed to apply themselves because they believed nobody cared about whether or not they succeeded.

The comments made by Dr. Orenduff are not entirely new. Other people at the college, including the former vice-president Dr. Donald Peters, said secondary school standards needed to be raised and certification changed. As a result, former Minister for Education Senator Milton Scott set up a committee to study certification at the start of the year, but to date, little has been said about its progress.

However chief education officer Dr. Joseph Christopher emphasised that both the Bermuda Secondary School Certificate (BSSC), and the new Bermuda School Certificate (BSC), demonstrated a good standard of achievement.

He said: "As part of the restructuring of the school system, we are in the process of changing the certificate awarded at the senior level. "The last BSSC students have just graduated and, in future, senior school students will take a four-year course leading to the new Bermuda School Certificate.

"These are both good, locally-developed certificates. I particularly hope that the community will not judge the BSC before the first students have even graduated. The BSSC was recognised in the UK as satisfying the requirements for equivalency to the GCSE in that country and was accepted as a satisfying the requirements for high school graduation that many four-year institutions in North America insisted upon. But we have found that the lack of an externally set standard means that the certificate can be vulnerable to criticism - particularly here in Bermuda. That is why we are looking again at this issue."

Dr. Christopher said the committee has met regularly and has reviewed certification systems in North America, the UK and in a number of small jurisdictions similar to Bermuda.