Sometimes, for various reasons, students just are not yet ready to sit the Leaving Cert.
This may be due to personal or family illness, exceptional emotional stress, a learning disability that more time is needed to tackle or simply a lack of maturity. Whatever the cause, a student who has had difficulty concentrating and keeping to a strict programme of study throughout the year, may be having the same problem now.
Even at this stage, some students and their parents will already be thinking about repeating the exam. Colleges, such as St Laurence College in Loughlinstown, Dublin, are already receiving applications for repeat courses for Autumn 2003. Considering that one St Laurence student increased her points by 290 last year, a repeat year can transform a student's prospects (and at a cost of just €1270 per year at St Laurence, which is run on a not-for-profit basis by the Marianist Order).
For a student with 450 points, an additional 80 points attained thanks to a further year of study can make the difference between accepting a compromise course and the course of your dreams, says Anne McCarry, deputy principal of St Laurence.
Last year, St Laurence's 100 students received 74 offers of university places, including 25 to UCD, 10 to Trinity, four to Dublin City University, 15 to DIT and two to NUI Maynooth. In all, the acceptance rate for students, including Dip/Cert offers, was 77.8 per cent.
If you are one of those students who is now sitting their Leaving Cert after repeating, you may find that you actually feel more worried about it, even though you are bound to do better.
As Marie Murray writes in her book, Surviving the Leaving Cert: Points for Parents: "Being a repeat student makes... the second attempt at the Leaving Cert far more significant because of the different psychological anxieties it imposes".
McCarry says that St Laurence's only takes students after interview, where it is impressed upon them that they must reform their study habits to succeed. Only students who demonstrate the will to do this are accepted
