Trinity College Dublin has defended the way it allocates places to A-level students, despite claims this has led Leaving Cert students to lose out in the first-round offers for its medicine course, which now requires 590 CAO points.
Under the new system, A-level students are assessed on four A-level results. However, Jan O'Sullivan, Labour Party spokeswoman on education, yesterday claimed the changes were negatively affecting places allocated to Leaving Cert students.
"Changes in the entry requirement for A-level students from the North were designed to reduce the advantage they had over Leaving Cert students," Ms O'Sullivan said. "However, the opposite has happened . . . the result is that students who worked extremely hard to reach the already extremely high standard have lost out."
A Trinity spokeswoman last night said: "The university is still in the admissions process but, in round one of the CAO, a majority of places in medicine was offered to Leaving Cert students," she said.
"Trinity College offered more places in medicine to Leaving Cert students in 2005 than in previous years because of the changes to the A-level selection criteria."
Last January, The Irish Times revealed that Trinity had sent letters to A-level schools in Britain and Northern Ireland which "proposed that for each undergraduate course, a percentage of places will be reserved for A-level applicants". Trinity subsequently denied it was reserving any places for A-level students.