Points up after record exam results

RECORD exam performances and more places set aside for mature students have driven up entry points for hundreds of degree courses for this year’s Leaving Certificate students.

Despite an expected rise in the number of places available at dozens of colleges, the points for half of around 850 honours degrees offered through the Central Applications Office (CAO) are up from last year.

School leavers need at least 15 points more than in 2009 for entry to 250 of those degrees, as 48,448 third-level applicants receive an offer this morning, leaving 21,322 of this year’s record applicant numbers without a college place yet.

But future college entrants could be facing financial as well as academic pressure as the Green Party has hinted at a willingness to accept the introduction of third-level fees that could be repaid in the form of a graduate tax, despite their insistence in last autumn’s revised coalition programme with Fianna Fáil that fees would not be returning. The party’s education spokesman Paul Gogarty TD said the Greens would have an open mind on a graduate tax scheme to help fund higher education if it can be shown not to place a huge burden on students or lead to an exodus of degree holders.

He insisted, however, that there would be no changes during the Government’s remaining term of office.

Some of the courses with the biggest CAO points increases today are in the business, science and engineering sectors, and the rise in academic standard of entrants to these courses should please the Government and industry leaders.

More than half of the biggest category of honours degree (level 8) programmes – arts and social sciences – require more points than last year.

The points for most nursing degrees have also risen and there are slight shifts up or down on most medicine and other health profession courses, such as dentistry and pharmacy.

Official figures obtained by the Irish Examiner reveal this year’s Leaving Certificate students have got record results when they combine the six best grades to calculate their CAO points.

Almost 16,700 of the 54,480 students who received their grades last Wednesday got at least 400 out of a maximum 600 points, the equivalent of four higher level C1s and two C2s. That is 30.6% of those who sat this years’s exams, a proportion never before recorded, and also for the first time, fewer than one-in-four students got less than 200 points.

The majority of those being offered one of their selected courses this morning are students who sat the exams in June, of whom 45,485 applied to the CAO. But only 3.4% more places are being made available to them than their counterparts last year, despite total applications rising 4%.

The number who have already accepted places in earlier stages of the CAO process is up by 12% to 7,280, mostly mature students who made up nearly one-in-five of this year’s record 77,628 CAO applicants.

Despite the record points scores and consequent increase in entry standards, the head of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors Eilis Coakley said the points system remains the fairest way of choosing Leaving Certificate students for degree courses, even with the stresses it puts on them. She said using other assessments in addition to exam results would only create new stresses without making life easier for teenagers.