Some 61,000 students will receive their Leaving Certificate exam results today. Many of them will immediately start totting up their points and comparing them to the scores required to get a place last year on the courses they want.
Some will comfortably exceed the threshold despite the partial reversal of the grade inflation that has been applied to Leaving Cert results since 2020. Others will have an anxious wait until the CAO offers come out to see if points have fallen in tandem with the expected fall in grades.
As is the case every year, many will be content with the outcome, but there will also be disappointment. This will be tinged by a sense of injustice in some cases because the playing field is a little less level than normal. Not only will this year’s Leaving Cert class have been competing with their own cohort but also with students who sat the exam in previous years and got the benefit of full grade inflation.
The gradual process of unwinding this grade adjustment is now underway. On average grades were inflated by 7 per cent last year compared to pre-Covid levels. This has fallen to 5.9 per cent in 2025 . While this may not seem like a lot, a loss of a small number of CAO points will be the difference between success and failure for some.
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There is no denying the unfairness of this, even if many students may not lose out in the end in terms of the college place they are seeking. Another approach would have been to readjust the results of those who carried forward inflated grades from previous years, though the Attorney General advised against this.
The arguments for unwinding the measure are strong and address important problems. First and foremost is the damage to the credibility of the Leaving Certificate caused by the high proportion of students achieving very high results. This has a knock on for the credibility of third level institutions that admit students on the basis of the exam and also the value of the qualifications they award. Everybody loses.
Grade inflation also prejudices the chances of students applying to Irish third level institutions from outside the state, in particular from Northern Ireland where Covid-related grade inflation has been unwound more rapidly. Reducing grade inflation should also address another unfairness, which is the use of random selection to award places on some courses because the number of students achieving the minimum number of points exceeds the number of places.
At some stage grade inflation had to be unwound. The approach adopted by the Department of Education is to step down inflation over three to four years. The Department has committed to reviewing its approach based on the outcome of this year’s reduction, but it is not possible to devise a process in which there are no losers.
