Will my son lose out in next year’s Leaving Cert due to return to ‘normal’ exams?

We recently attended our son’s sixth-year parent-teacher meeting online. We were surprised that his teachers were uncertain as to his potential grades and therefore CAO points. They said they couldn’t predict how the Leaving Cert results will be next year. Is this true?

It is not at all surprising that his teachers are currently not in a position to predict what his potential grades might transpire to be, when they are announced next August.

The uncertainty of the past two years has left all involved in our second-level exam process in a less predictable world.

Minister for Education Norma Foley has stated that the Leaving Cert will return to its pre-pandemic format in 2022. She has also stated that the exams will be amended to take account of the lost face-to-face tuition time in January-April 2021.

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It means your son will have a wider choice of questions, and more time to answer each question, than pre-pandemic Leaving Cert students had.

The grades he achieves in his exams will be dependent largely on the marking schemes devised by the State Examinations Commission (SEC). Nobody, including your sons' teachers, knows how that will operate in 2022. However, it seems likely that grades will be significantly lower than the record-breaking set of results this year.

What evidence have I to make that claim? More than half of grades awarded to students in the 2021 Leaving Cert were at least one grade higher than those secured in their written exams thanks to the accredited grades awarded by your sons’ teachers, standardised by the SEC.

If the exams operate as the Minister is suggesting, then more than half of next year’s grades awarded to students in August next year will be on average at least one lower than in 2021.

Why should that affect whether your son secures an offer of a place in one of his desired courses? Surely if grades return to pre-pandemic levels, CAO points requirements will also drop to those required in 2019?

That argument would hold if the competition for college places were confined to the current Leaving Cert class.

However, of the 84,000 individuals who applied to the CAO to secure a college place in 2021, only 48,000 had sat the Leaving Cert in 2021. The remainder included about 8,000 college applicants who sat their Leaving Cert in 2020 and about 2,500 from each of the preceding three years.

So, next year there will be thousands of young people reapplying for college places on the basis of – potentially – more generous results they secured in 2021 and 2020 due to the calculated-grades process.

All your sons’ teachers can tell you for now is how he is performing in terms of normal expectations. Unlike in pre-pandemic times, they have no idea if grades he will secure in August 2022 will secure him an offer in his desired courses.