SOME Leaving Certificate students who receive their results tomorrow are to be provided with additional information designed to reduce the possibility of errors.
A supplementary report will be issued in cases where a student's results are not based on all compulsory components of a subject.
The report will be issued to almost 2,000 out of the 60,000 students who sat the examination. In most cases this will happen where a student was absent from, or did not complete, a practical, oral or other component of a subject. However, the new procedure will also detect cases where a student has not been credited for a component.
The Department of Education has introduced this reform as a result of the problems encountered in the marking of last year's art exam, when the craftwork submitted by 50 students was not assessed and Departmental checks failed to detect the error.
The Department is advising schools to contact it in cases where information on the report conflicts with the position known to the school and candidate.
For the first time, the Department is operating a freephone service to deal with exam queries. The service, which opens on Thursday and continues until the end of next week, is aimed at schools rather than parents or students.
Appeals against exam grades will be processed more quickly this year. Applications for an appeal, which cost £25 per subject, must reach the Department's exams branch in Athlone, by 5 p.m. on August 23rd. This gives schools three days to decide whether to appeal on behalf of a student, compared to two weeks last year.
The results of all appeals will be posted on September 27th.
In a handful of cases, the Department will issue supplementary reports in cases where errors have been found during the checking process. For example, two students who took oral exams and signed the attendance sheet were not graded for this component as the examiner failed to assign them a mark.
In another case, a team of Department officials searched for four days before locating one student's technical drawing paper which had been mislaid by a supervisor.
A Fine Gael TD, Ms Theresa Ahearn, yesterday blamed the media for adding to anxiety levels suffered by leaving Cert students. She suggested that unnecessary frustration" could be removed by posting exam results directly to the students.