OVER 6,000 students are to receive improve Leaving Certificate marks following a review of the calculated grades system.
Two errors occurred in this year’s system, and 7,200 grades were affected. Both errors related to the way in which candidates’ Junior Cycle results were included in the standardisation process.
They resulted in incorrect grades being awarded to some students when they received their results on 7 September.
6,870 grades in total will increase affecting 6,100 students.
614 schools and other centres recognised to hold the Leaving Certificate will have one or more upgraded results. This is out of a total of 741 schools and centres.
The Department of Education and Skills will re-open the student Calculated Grades portal at 6pm today, Saturday 3 October, and all students who are due to receive corrected, higher grades, will be able to access their results
When the portal is reopening students will receive a text message to say whether their grade is changing to a higher grade or not.
ETS raised two issues in their statement.
The first is an error which occurred in the use of data, where a student did not sit all three core subjects at Junior Cycle.
In those cases, the system was meant to use the average national Junior Cycle score, in the missing subject, of the group of students who took their Leaving Certificate in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020.
Instead, it chose that student’s next best subject for inclusion in the group computation.
The second issue raised by ETS is how the algorithm treated students’ marks at the extreme ends of the scale. ETS noted that the treatment does not exactly match what is described in the national standardisation group’s report, and confirmed that this does not have any meaningful impact on results.
The CAO will now establish how many students are eligible to receive a new CAO offer.
The Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science will work with the CAO and the higher education institutions to see how these students can be facilitated to commence the course that they would, in other circumstances, have been offered in an earlier round.
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