High-scoring Leaving Cert students may miss out on preferred CAO courses

Some students who received more than 600 points in their Leaving Cert may miss out on their first-choice course in the first round of CAO offers on Tuesday because of grade inflation.

CAO points for university and college courses are set to increase when offers are made in the first round due to a record number of students securing the highest grades in this year’s Leaving Cert.

"The likelihood is that the points are going up and going up quite significantly on the back of the increased Leaving Cert results," said Pól Ó Dochartaigh, deputy president of NUI Galway and chairman of the CAO.

Points would rise “across a whole range disciplines”, he said, and described the capacity issues in universities to cope with the increased number of applicants as a “real challenge”.

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Evidence of Leaving Cert grade inflation across the board

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“If people are comparing the points that were required last year or the year before with the points that they got in their Leaving Cert this year, then some will be disappointed, but an awful lot of people will still be very happy,” he said.

“The points [for their preferred courses] will have gone up but their Leaving Cert points will have gone up.”

Minister for Further and Higher Education Simon Harris said Tuesday would be "a day of mixed emotions for many people – a day of delight for many, a day of disappointment for some".

He advised those who did not secure their preferred course to know there are “many opportunities, options and pathways for you to get where you want to get to”.

Pandemic

Leaving Cert results were based on accredited grades or written exams or both this year due to the disruption to schooling caused by restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic.

A State Examinations Commission report found that 52.5 per cent of Leaving Cert students received a higher grade because their accredited grade result was higher than their exam result.

Overall, results were 2.6 per cent ahead of the 2020 Leaving Cert results, which were in turn 4.4 per cent ahead of the 2019 exams, though the level of the increase was greater in top grades in higher subjects. This will leave CAO applicants seeking university and college places based on their Leaving Cert results in 2019 and earlier years at a significant disadvantage.

"The big losers are students who did their Leaving Cert in 2019 and earlier because they cannot compete on a level playing pitch given the level of grade inflation over the last two years," said Kieran Christie, general secretary of the Association of Secondary Teachers in Ireland.

This was a “very unfortunate side effect” of the pandemic measures in education, he said.

There is expected to be greater levels of random selection where applicants for high-demand courses such as medicine, dentistry and law may not be guaranteed a place on their preferred course, even though they achieve the required points.

Despite the availability of almost 5,000 new third-level places, there is additional pressure on third-level places with 84,817 CAO applicants this year – an increase of 8 per cent on 2020 – and more applicants from other EU countries seeking places in Irish universities and colleges due to the increased cost of studying in post-Brexit Britain.

Mr Christie said the Government must “look very carefully” at how grade inflation was “unwound” so that the Leaving Cert class of 2022 was also not left at a disadvantage competing with the higher grades of students in the Leaving Cert classes of 2020 and 2021.

“Action needs to be taken. We can’t have grade inflation every year. Even the freezing of it creates its own problems,” he said.