Leaving Cert 2023: For how much longer will grade inflation be with us?

Conor Aherne, Luke O'Sullivan, Natalia Sieradzk, Shauna White, and Henok Attikossie, all pupils of the Nagle Community College, Cork, who will access their Leaving Cert results by phone. Picture: Dan Linehan

Grasping the nettle of grade inflation won't be easy, and it seems unlikely we will see a drastic reversal of the pandemic-era phenomenon anytime soon.

While exam bosses have staved off further runaway increases across the board for a second year in a row, this year's results remain inflated when compared to 2019, at an overall average rate of 7%. 

Today marks a major milestone for thousands of students across the country as they receive their Leaving Cert results — an exciting occasion, the end of a challenge, and the start of a new chapter.

As there is every year, some students inevitably will be disappointed with their results both today and again next week when the first round of college place offers are issued on Wednesday.

When entry to the course you’ve set your sights on comes down to margins as small as an increase of five CAO points, give or take, or even random selection in some particularly unlucky cases, commentary around overall grade inflation can seem absurd.

What good are bumper grades when you miss out on your first choice? Some students may wonder why a fuss was made at all.

The beginnings of grade inflation

But for the fourth year in a row, the Leaving Cert has been impacted by the pandemic and its fallout, prompting concerns around the fairness of grade inflation and the impact this could have on third-level education.

The four cycles of upheaval started in 2020 when the terminal, traditional written exams in June were cancelled due to covid-19, and ‘calculated grades’ were introduced.

This saw teachers grading their own students for the first time, as well as a series of post-marking adjustments overseen by the Department of Education.

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That year, grade inflation rose on average by 4.4%.

In 2021, the exams went ahead, but with a twist — students were assessed through either written exams, ‘accredited grades’, or both.

Grade inflation again continued to soar that year as students were awarded whichever was highest of the two grades.

Normality resumed somewhat in 2022 with the return of traditional exams.

However, a wide range of adjustments were made to the papers in both 2021 and 2022 to take into account the disruption to students' education caused by covid-19 public health restrictions and school closures.

These changes to the exam papers effectively gave students more choices and more time to answer.

Impact on 2023 Leaving Cert grades

This brings us to 2023. While students this year received some adjustments to the exam papers, they weren’t as wide-ranging as in previous years.

It's also worth noting that for the Class of 2023, the Leaving Cert was their first experience of a State exam hall, after their Junior Cycle exams in 2020 were called off.

Once the 2023 exams were initially marked, it was noted by exam chiefs that the results were lower across the board than the unadjusted marks of 2022, and more like the ones seen during a normal exam year.

This means results would have been more in line with pre-pandemic marks, had there been no post-marking adjustments made.

Education Minister Norma Foley: No ‘cliff-edge’ return to pre-pandemic grades. Picture: Colin Keegan, Collins Dublin

However, Education Minister Norma Foley pledged to students that, on average, results would be no lower on average for the class of 2023 than for the class of 2022.

After the results were issued last September, she signalled there would be no ‘cliff-edge’ return to pre-pandemic grades, and that any return would do so gradually.

She had previously made the same promise to the class of 2022.

The CAO process

If you are wondering what may have influenced that decision to bring results this year in line with last, it’s worth considering who is applying to the CAO. A significant proportion of students apply for college places each year who present Leaving Cert results from years prior.

As the CAO process is a finely tuned machine determining college course entry, to drastically ‘deflate’ grades back to pre-pandemic levels would disadvantage any year it applied to against their peers who benefitted from overall grade inflation.

With the unadjusted 2023 marks lower than those of 2022, it meant a bigger adjustment was needed to bring the results in line with the 2022 average.

In the interest of fairness, and to minimise grade inflation as much as possible, an adjustment was made that was greatest at the lower end of marks.

The same adjustment was applied across all subjects and levels by the State Examinations Commission (SEC), and the same approach was used for Leaving Cert Applied, but with credits instead of marks.

In an exam marked out of 100, roughly this adjustment post-marking added a little under 13 marks to a mark of zero, just under nine marks to a mark of 50, and just over five marks to a mark of 100, which would have been capped at 100%.

If and when students view their exam scripts, they should be able to see how the post-marking adjustment applied to their marks.

Across the board, at all levels, the proportion of grades in each band is broadly similar this year to 2022.

However, while it's worth keeping in mind that there are other factors at play, the number of students continuing to receive top marks in all higher-level subjects has continued to surge since 2019.

This is particularly notable across Irish, English, and maths.

In 2019, little over 6% of students opting for the higher-level Irish exam received a H1 grade, worth 100 points. In 2023, this proportion stood at 15.4%.

In English, 3% of students at higher level received a H1 grade in 2019, but this had more than doubled by 2023, to 7.4%.

In 2019, 6.4% received a H1 in maths, worth 125 points. In 2023, this stood at 10.9%. The percentages of students receiving H1 grades in history, French, German, and Spanish have more than doubled this year when compared to 2019, while the percentage of students receiving H1 grades in geography has almost tripled. 

Britain's experience sparks concern

Tackling grade inflation is not a straightforward process, and could inadvertently widen attainment gaps, something that exam chiefs, politicians, schools, and students here will be keen to avoid.

In England, this year’s A-Level results have fallen steeply as it attempts to address pandemic-era grade inflation. Its schools saw the proportions of students receiving top grades this year falling quicker than their counterparts in Wales, Scotland, or Northern Ireland.

While it has almost reversed grade inflation completely, and overall grades are still up when compared to 2019, it has also sparked fears of a widening regional attainment gap between schools in the north and south of that country.

While students in London and the south-east continued to achieve the highest share of the top grades, these marks fell below pre-pandemic levels in the north-east. So it has been far from an easy process.

Department 'considering the approach for future years'

Education sources say that reducing accommodations and moving the papers back to a pre-covid experience this year for a cohort of students whose first experience of a State exam was the Leaving Cert was, in a way, a sustainable move away from grade inflation. 

A spokeswoman for the Department of Education told the Irish Examiner that a return towards normal has been progressed this year through the provision of a more limited set of assessment adjustments. 

"Accordingly, the exam experience for students has moved back towards pre-pandemic norms and is much closer to, say, the 2019 experience," she said.

For that reason, the minister decided that in order to support students, the post-marking adjustment should maintain grades in the aggregate at the same level as 2022, she added.

The minister’s commitment remains that there will be no 'cliff edge' for 2023 students in terms of a return to pre-pandemic grade levels and that it will be done in stages," she said.

"The department is considering the approach for future years, and in doing so seeks to balance all the impacts and ensure an approach that is as fair as possible given the circumstances, with the overarching aim of returning to normal grade levels in a phased way." 

A spokesman for Ms Foley confirmed that no decision regarding the 2024 exams has yet to be made. 

In the short term, attention now turns to the first round of CAO offers which will be issued to students next week. Predicting how CAO points may go up or down is not an exact science, as a range of factors, including supply and demand, influence the overall points trends. 

Many students will access their results on Friday via an online dedicated portal via their phones, with schools remaining open to offer congratulations or support.