A new model of Leaving Cert grades will see 17% of teacher-predicted grades being marked down and 4% will be increased.
Education Minister Norma Foley has announced a new process for calculated grades today, which will ensure that students from disadvantaged backgrounds are not treated unfairly based on their school’s past results.
The change introduced by Minister Foley removes the use of school-by-school historical data in the standardisation model. This places a greater emphasis on the estimated marks provided by schools to individual students.
Under the new model, 79.3% of grades assigned by teachers will be unchanged in the final calculations. 3.9% of grades will be increased as a result of standardisation, with the increase being 5% in DEIS schools as compared to a 3.7% increase in non-DEIS schools.
16.8% of all grades will be lowered by one grade as a result of standardisation and 0.1% of grades will be lowered by more than one grade.
The change comes after the UK government was forced to abandon standardisation plans for A-level results after a large number of students’ grades were marked down.
Up to 61,000 Leaving Cert students in Ireland will receive their Calculated Grades results on 7th September.
Minister for Further and Higher Education Simon Harris has also confirmed 1,250 additional higher education places to be offered on certain high-demand courses for the academic year 2020/21. These courses include nursing, pharmacy, medicine and post-primary teaching.
Minister Harris said: “The extra places are focused on high-demand programmes that traditionally attract students across a range of CAO points levels, and this will have a cascade effect, creating greater capacity in lower demand courses.”
The Department of Education has published a Q & A page for Leaving Cert students at: https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/ad9de-leaving-certificate-2020-your-questions-answered-september-2020/