Jess Casey: School marks show just how close some students came to achieving their courses

Some 20% of grades awarded by schools to higher level student were downgraded, leaving some students frustrated. File picture.

Without a doubt, the CAO can be a cruel process that, every year, sees some students miss out on their chosen college courses, sometimes by as little as a single point. 

However this year, it has been further complicated by the fact students caught a glimpse of ‘what might have been’ when they received their school-estimates for their calculated grades on Monday as the appeals process opened.

Necessary for transparency, these estimates will be a bitter pill to swallow for plenty. 

"I just felt sick when I saw them," one student told the Irish Examiner. 

After receiving an offer for his fifth choice college course last Friday, the student accepted that he'd missed out. 

He said: "I was happy enough when I got my results because I really didn't think I was heavily downgraded. I trusted my teachers' judgement on it.

"But most of my subjects were downgraded, and I would have gotten my first choice if they hadn't been. I do feel angry. I also understand that the Government has to downgrade students but from what I've seen, it seems like everyone was downgraded and they didn't have any trust in our teachers at all." 

The student attended a private grinds school. 

“I know people think we’re all entitled and that we come from money, but I don’t. 

I took out a loan, I went to a Deis school before. I just really wanted my course.

Another student who contacted the Irish Examiner said he was "devasted" to discover he had been given a H5 in biology, one of the entry requirements for his first two choices on his CAO. 

"I was heartbroken but accepted that my teacher obviously used his professional judgement to give me this grade," he said. 

When he logged in to the portal on Monday, he saw he was downgraded in every subject including biology, which was lowered to a grade 1% less than the entry requirement for his dream course.

There were always going to be students unhappy when they saw school-estimates, despite overall record results. Without standardisation, CAO cut-off points would have likely skyrocketed even further. 

Despite this, many grades stayed the same; approximately 323,000 of the 410,000 grades that went to students remained unchanged from the marks given to them by their school and, overall, just 17% of all estimates were reduced. However, when you dig into this figure, you can see that at higher level, one-in-five school estimates were lowered, translating to almost 55,900 grades. At ordinary level, this stood at 9%, or approximately 10,200 grades. 

While the Department of Education stands over the distribution of these downgrades, there were always going to be students who would feel hard-done-by when they received more than one. Coupled with the talk of grade inflation, and the record surges in entry requirements for college courses, they were always going to feel a bit cheated. 

The "cornerstone" of the calculated grades model was listening to the professional judgement of teachers so, of course, students will question why it did not seem to be listened to in certain cases. 

Students may also find disappointment in the appeals process, which is strictly confined to checking if there has been an administrative error. While these kinds of mistakes can happen, the process will not focus on how schools determined grades, or on the method used by the department to standardise and verify these.

Students still have the option to sit the exams when they are held in November. However, this is still just a proposal dependent on public health, and it will not be in time for college this year. 

It is easy to see how this will be legally fraught.