Leaving Cert: 2024 grades remain largely unchanged

Students will receive the results of the 2024 Leaving Certificate when they log on to their Candidate Self Service Portal (CSSP) on the State Examinations Commission portal from 10am this morning.
Grades this year were expected to remain generally unchanged. Following her announcement earlier this year of the adjustments to the assessment arrangements for students taking examinations in 2024, Minister for Education Norma Foley gave a commitment that there would be no return to pre-pandemic grade profiles for Leaving Certificate results this year.
This commitment to avoid a “cliff-edge” in the profile of results has required an adjustment to the marks awarded to students through the recent marking process.
Will this make securing a preferred CAO course any easier? Unfortunately for some students, the joy at receiving upwardly-adjusted results may be short-lived given that securing an offer in a desired course requires an applicant to be among the top number of students who sought a place on that programme through the CAO.
Minister Foley has been walking a tightrope for several years in planning to gradually bring Leaving Cert grades back to pre-Covid 2019 levels, without negatively affecting each year’s Leaving Cert CAO applicants.
The grade inflation that has become embedded in the system since 2020 is a complex problem to correct. Inflating everybody’s marks by a standardised percentage does not improve a Leaving Cert student’s place in the overall rankings. If an applicant is the 101st on the course list where there are 100 places on offer, they will still miss out on an offer.
Why then did the Minister continue to offer inflated grades to students if it was not going to improve their chances? The answer is that students who have just sat the Leaving Certificate account for 60 per cent of the total number of applicants to the CAO in any given year. This year, there are at least 12,000-15,000 applicants in the CAO process who secured their Leaving Cert in 2020, 2021 2022 or 2023.
With high Leaving Cert marks baked into the results of those classes it would have been grossly unfair to the class of 2024 to have allowed the pattern of results to revert to pre-Covid levels.
The dilemma that arises from the Minister’s actions is that in continuing to inflate grades to 2023, 2022 and 2021 levels for the class of 2024, she has created the identical problem for the class of 2025.
But that will become the problem for the next incoming Minister for Education after the forthcoming General Election.
The role of schools now that students receive their results online has changed.
Schools have always provided an important role in offering guidance and support to students on results day. School principals will provide support to students by allowing them to come to the school, if they wish, at a scheduled time to meet members of the student-support team including guidance counsellors, year heads, tutors and chaplains.
Given that the new academic year is only days away, last year’s Leaving Cert classes who arrange to go to their school to seek support will be required to attend by appointment so that the teachers they wish to meet can arrange to be available.
The SEC will also now provide the Leaving Cert results directly to the CAO. This will allow the CAO to process applications for entry to higher education without delay and release the first-round offers at 2pm next Wednesday, August 28th. At that stage applicants will see whether they have secured the required number of points to receive an offer on one of their top college choices.
Candidates in the Leaving Certificate and Leaving Certificate Applied examinations will be afforded an opportunity to view their own marked scripts in the coming days.
Initially, candidates will see their marks included for each component on the portal on Tuesday, August 27th at 12 noon.
The portal will also allow candidates to apply to view their marked examination scripts and later to view their scripts online. Viewing of most scripts online will be available from 9 am on Saturday, August 31st for 24 hours until 9 am Sunday 1st September.
This allows candidates to satisfy themselves that the marking scheme has been applied correctly to their work and, in addition to enhancing transparency, is designed to assist candidates in making an informed decision to appeal a result in one or more subjects.
With the migration to online marking for most subjects, the process will primarily involve viewing marked PDFs of scripts online via the Candidate Self Service Portal.
In any subject that is manually marked, viewing hard-copy marked scripts will be facilitated in schools in one of two three-hour sessions on Saturday 31st August 9.30am-12.30pm or 2-5pm. Candidates will continue to have access to the published marking schemes, whether the subject was marked on paper or online.
Candidates will also have access to the examination’s appeal process. This will follow the SEC appeal procedures and will include an opportunity to view the scripts marked by the examiners. Appeals are open from 10 am on Sunday 1st September to 5 pm on Monday September 2nd.
The appeals process will include further recourse to Independent Appeals Scrutineers, whose role is to check to ensure the correct procedures were followed throughout the appeals process.
The SEC has stated that the intended date for the issue of the results of the 2024 Leaving Certificate appeals is Friday 27 September. This is the first time since 2019 that it has been able to announce a date at this stage of the process.
Students are advised to visit examinations.ie for more information.