The CAO Points, are awarded based on the Irish Leaving Certificate examinations. The Central Applications Office is an independent organisation in Ireland who manages student applications to third level education and the allocation of places based on the CAO points system.

The Irish Leaving Certificate is the terminal examinations for most students in secondary schools in Ireland. There are a number of different levels (of difficulty) for most subjects. The CAO uses the Leaving Certificate examinations results to calculate the total number of points earned by the students. These are used to rank students to third level courses across the country.

This data set contains profiling of CAO points between 2015-2022, with the number of students and percentage of students obtaining CAO Points within various ranges.

This data set can be used to profile the CAO Points across each year. The data set is available for each one to use for your own analysis.

Click here to download the data set (in MS Excel format).