Almost 74,000 students will receive their Junior Cycle results on Wednesday, a record number to sit the State exam.
Results will be issued to individual schools through the State Examinations Commission’s (SEC’s) School Portal from 10am, and it will then be up to principals to distribute the scores.
Students can also access their results on examinations.ie.
Some 73,879 candidates sat the exam this year, up by less than 1 per cent on the 73,336 who sat it in 2025. Some 651,123 grades across 21 individual subjects will be issued by the SEC on Wednesday.
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This is the fifth year of the revised Junior Cycle curriculum, which combines classroom-based assessments with a final exam.
The grading scale no longer features As, Bs and Cs, but instead is marked in Distinction, Higher Merit, Merit, etc. These grading bands were tweaked further in 2025, with the top four grade descriptors now evenly distributed in bands of 15 percentage points.
This is the first year the revised grade bands were incorporated directly into the normal marking process - in 2025, they were implemented by the SEC through a technical intervention following the marking.
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All subjects in Junior Cycle are examined at Common level, except Irish, English and Mathematics, which are examined at Higher and Ordinary level.
The percentage of Distinctions, aggregated across all subjects, was 8.6 per cent this year, the same as last year.
The percentage of Higher Merits was 30.2 per cent this year, compared to 30.4 per cent last year.
One exam that students found difficult this year was French, with one teacher, Elizabeth Lyne, describing it as “an absolute horror show”.
Students sitting the Common level paper do not have any element of choice, and Lyne said many were thrown by a question about pocket money.
“A lot of teachers want to see the reintroduction of higher and ordinary level French at Junior Cycle. The current Common level paper discriminates against the weaker student. At a time when language learning should be to the forefront, it is making it harder for younger people,” Lyne told The Irish Times after the exam in June.
Results show some 9.8 per cent achieved a distinction in French, up from 8 per cent last year.
However, more of the lowest grades were issued, with some 1.4 per cent not graded, compared to 0.9 per cent last year, 11.5 per cent Partially Achieved compared to 10.5 per cent last year, and 25.1 per cent Achieved compared to 23.6 per cent last year.
