Students frustrated by CAO website traffic
Some of his classmates at Christian Brothers College (CBC) in Cork city were up until the early hours trying to get their choices accepted.
“I stayed at it from the minute I got home from school on Monday, because I thought that if it was that busy it would only be worse over the following days,” said Conor who lives in Cobh.
“When I got up the first page of the application form it was fine, but as I went along the pages would just time out instead of loading up. The website hadn’t actually crashed but it was so busy, you just couldn’t do anything on it,” he said.
Conor’s guidance counsellor Paul Ó Seanacháin said that, just as in other schools around the country, most students had already applied before this week but many ran into trouble in recent days.
“We’ve had students having to stay up until 3am or 4am and then coming into school the next day tired and frustrated. The CAO encourages people to apply online but then they run into difficulties like this,” he said.
Despite the problems of the past week admissions officers in the 42 colleges which use the CAO system to select entrants will not be taking into account when applications were made.
“When it comes to the offering of places in August, everyone is on a level playing field,” Cork Institute of Technology registrar Brendan Goggin said last night.
Union of Secondary Students (USS) president Nikolai Trigoub-Rotnem said it was highly disappointing that the CAO was not ready for the amount of traffic on its website.
“Surely they can predict how many people apply online in the last few days and modify their bandwidth accordingly,” he said.
