Leaving Cert 2024 set to be last to benefit from bumper grades. What happens to next year’s students?

This, we are told, will be the final year of bumper Leaving Cert grades.
After several years of unprecedented grade inflation, there will be what education officials describe as a “glide path” back to normal results from next year.
It suggests a smooth and gentle transition back to normal grades.
With so much at stake, and entry to college courses on the line, the likelihood is it will be anything but a soft landing.
Next year’s students on lower grades will be in competition for college places with candidates on higher grades who had the good luck to sit their exams at the right time.
[ Leaving Cert results are out on Friday. What can students expect?Opens in new window ]
In the meantime, many of the 60,000-plus Leaving Cert candidates who receive their results from 10am today are in line for a pleasant surprise: their results, on the whole, are equal to last year’s record-breaking set of grades.
The State Examinations Commission has adjusted students’ marked scripts upwards by an average of 7.5 per cent over recent weeks as part of a “postmarking adjustment”. This process has resulted in 68 per cent of grades increasing. In short, students are gaining, on average, about 60 CAO points more than they would have before the pandemic.
It follows a direction from Minister for Education Norma Foley to the State Examinations Commission to ensure this year’s results would be no lower on aggregate than last years.
Why? Foley says this is about achieving “fairness” for a group of students whose education was badly disrupted during Covid.
Their time at secondary level was marked by a legacy of closed schools and online learning. This is also a cohort, which, in most cases, never sat any State exam before due to the cancellation of Junior Cycle exams.
Her argument is that keeping their results in line with the high level of the past three years or so means they will not be disadvantaged in the competition for CAO points and college places.
[ Key dates for Leaving Cert 2024: Results, script viewing, appeals and offersOpens in new window ]
Grades began to soar in 2020 and 2021 due, mainly, to the use of teacher-predicted grades, and they have been artificially kept at that level ever since.
While it may keep many students – and parents – happy, there are also serious downsides to maintaining inflated grades.
Strong grades mean high CAO points requirements for many courses. It also makes it harder for universities to differentiate between top candidates. We’ve even seen in recent years how unlucky students on maximum points – 625 – missed out on their chosen courses due to the use of random selection. We may well see a repeat of this next Wednesday when CAO offers are issued.
There is also the matter of the integrity of the Leaving Cert qualifications themselves. It is vital for grades to hold their value for universities, which set minimum entry criteria for courses, and for students, who need to be academically able for their courses.
Changes, however, are looming.
Foley has finally pledged that grades will begin to return on a “phased” level back to more normal levels from next year onwards.
[ I get my Leaving Cert results on Friday morning. What should I do then?Opens in new window ]
It will fall to her successor, we presume, to do the unpopular work of deflating exam results over the coming years.
It may be necessary, but many students – and their parents – will not be happy. Candidates may miss out on their dream courses by tiny margins, simply because they sat the exam in the wrong year and were up against competitors from previous years with more generous results. Legal actions will doubtless be a possibility.
A glide path? It sounds optimistic. Right now, it looks like a bumpy journey lies ahead.