2024 Leaving Certificate Results – Inline

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The 2024 Leaving Certificate results are out. Up, down and across the country there have been tears of joy and some muted celebrations. But there have been some disappointments too. Although the government has been talking about how the marks have been increased, with post mark adjustments, this doesn’t help students come to terms with their results.

In previous years, I’ve looked at the profile of marks across some (not all) of the Leaving Certificate tools (the tools I used included an Oracle Database, and used Oracle Analytics Cloud to do some of the analysis along with other tools). Check out these previous posts

From analysing the results for 2024, both numerically and graphically, we can see the results this year are broadly inline with last year. That news might bring some joy to some students but will be slightly disappointing for others. You can see this for yourself from the graphics below. However, in some subjects, there appears to be some minor (yes very minor) changes in the profiles, with a slight shift to the left, indicating a slight decrease in the higher grades and a corresponding increase in lower grades. But across many subjects, we have seen a slight increase in those achieving a H1 grade. The impact of these slight changes will be seen in the CAO points needed for the courses in the 550+ courses. But for the courses below 500 points, we might not see much of a change in CAO points. Although there might be some minor fluctuations based on demand for certain courses, which is typical most years.

I’ll have another post looking at the CAO points after they are released, so look out for that post.

The charts below give the profile of marks for each year between 2019 (pre-Covid) and 2024. The chart on the left includes all years, and the chart on the right is for the last four years. This allows us to see if there have been any adjustments in the profiles over those years. For most subjects, we can see a marked reduction of marks for certain subjects since the 2021 exceptionally high marks. While some subjects are almost back to matching the 2019 profile (science subjects, Irish), for others the stepback needed is small. Based on the messaging from the government, the stepping back will commence in 2025

Back in April, an Irish Times article discussed the changes coming from 2025, where there will be a gradual return to “normal” (pre-Covid) profile of marks. Looking at the profile of marks over the past couple of years we can clearly see there has been some stepping back in the profile of marks. Some subjects are back to pre-Covid 2019 profiles. In some subjects, this is more evident than in others. They’ve used the phrase “on aggregate” to hide the stepping back in some subjects and less so in others.

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