CAO
CAO Points 2023 – Slight Deflation
There have been lots of talk and news articles written about Grade Inflation over the past few years (the Covid years) and this year was no different. Most of the discussion this year began a couple of days before the Leaving Cert results were released last week and continued right up to the CAO publishing the points needed for each course. Yes, something needs to be done about the grading profiles and to revert back to pre-Covid levels. There are many reasons why this is necessary. Perhaps the most important of which is to bring back some stability to the Leaving Cert results and corresponding CAOs Points for entry to University courses. Last year, we saw there was some minor stepping back or deflating of results. But this didn’t have much of an impact on points needed for University courses. But in 2023 we have seen a slight step back in the points needed. I mentioned this possibility in my post on the Leaving Cert profile of marks. I also mentioned the subject with the biggest step back in marks/grades was Maths, and it looks like this has had an impact on the CAO point needed.
In 2023, we have seen a drop in points for 60% of University courses. In most years (pre and post-Covid) there would always be some fluctuation of points but the fluctuations would be minor. In 2023, some courses have changed by 20+ points.
The following table and chart illustrate the profile of CAO points and the percentage of students who achieved this in ranges of 50 points.
An initial look at the data and the chart it appears the 2023 CAO points profile is very similar to that of 2022. But when you look a little closer a few things stand out. At the upper end of CAO points we see a small reduction in the percentage of students. This is reflected when you look at the range of University courses in this range. The points for these have reduced slightly in 2023 and we have fewer courses using random selection. If you now look at the 300-500 range, we see a slight increase in the percentage of students attaining these marks. But this doesn’t seem to reflect an increase in the points needed to gain entry to a course in that range. This could be due to additional places that Universities have made available across the board. Although there are some courses where there is an increase.
In 2023, we have seen a change in the geographic spread of interest in University courses, with more demand/interest in Universities outside of the Dublin region. The lack of accommodation and their costs in Dublin is a major issue, and students have been looking elsewhere to study and to locations they can easily commute to. Although demand for Trinity and UCD remains strong, there was a drop in the number for TU Dublin. There are many reported factors for this which include the accommodation issue and for those who might have considered commuting, the positioning of the Grangegorman campus in Dublin does not make this easy, unlike Trinity, UCD and DCU.
I’ve the Leaving Cert grades by subject and CAO Points datasets in a Database (Oracle). This allows me to easily analyse the data annually and to compare them to previous years, using a variety of tools.
Leaving Certificate 2023: In-line or more adjustments
The Leaving Certificate results were released this morning. Congratulations to everyone who has completed this major milestone. It’s a difficult set of examinations and despite all the calls to reform the examinations process, it has largely remained unchanged in decades, apart from some minor changes.
Last year (2022) I analysed some of the Leaving Certificate results. This was primarily focused on higher level papers and for a subset of the subjects. Some of these are the core subjects and some of the optional subjects. Just like last year we are told by the Department of Education the results this year will in-aggregate be in-line with last year. This statement is very confusing and also misleading. What does it really mean? No one has given a clear definition or explanation. What it tries to convey is the profile marks by subject are the same as last year. We say last year this was Not the case and we saw some grade deflation back towards the pre-Covid profile. Some though a similar stepping back this year, just like we have seen in the UK and other European countries.
The State Examinations Commission has released the break down of numbers and percentages of student who were awarded each grade by students. There are lots of ways to analyse this data from using Python and other Data Analytics tools, but for me I’ve loaded the data into an Oracle Database, and used Oracle Analytics Cloud to do some of the analysis along with other tools.
Let’s start with the core exam subjects of Irish, English and Maths. For Irish, last year we saw a step back in the profile of marks. This was a significant step back towards the marks in 2019 (pre-Covid). There wasn’t much discussion about this last year, and perhaps one of the reason is Irish is typically not counted towards their CAO points, as it is typically one of the weaker subjects for a lot of students. This year the profile of marks for Irish is in-line with last year’s profile (+/- small percentages) with slight up tick in H1 grades. For English, the profile of marks for 2021, 2022 and 2023 are almost exactly the same. But for Maths we do see a step back (moving the the left in the figure below) with a significantly lower percentage of student achieving a H2 or H1. Although we do see a slight increase in those getting H4 and H3 grades There was some problems with one of the Maths papers and perhaps marks were not adjusted due to those issues, which isn’t right to me as something should have been done. But perhaps a decision was made to all this step back in Maths to reduce the number of students achieving the top points of 625 and avoiding the scenario where those student do not get their first choice course for university.
The SEC have said the following about the marking of Maths Paper 1. “This process resulted in a marking scheme that was at the more lenient end of the normal range“. Even with more lenient marking and grade adjustments the profile of marks has taken a step backwards. This does raise question about how lenient they were or no and if the post mark adjusts took into account last year’s profile, or they are looking to step back to pre-Covid profiles.
When we look at the Science students of Physics, Chemistry and Biology, we can see the profile of marks for this year is broadly in line with last years (2022). When looking at the profiles for these subjects, we can see that they are very similar to the pre-Covid profiles. Although there are some minor differences. We are still seeing an increased level H1s across this students when compared to pre-Covid 2019 levels. With lower grades having a slightly smaller percentage profile when compared to pre-Covid 2019 level. Look at the profiles 2022 and 2023 are broadly in-line with with 2019 (with some minor variations).
There are more subjects to report upon, but those listed above will cover most students.
What do these results and profile of marks mean for students looking to go to University or further education where the courses are based on the CAO Points systems. It looks like the step back in grade profile for Maths will have the biggest impact on CAO Points for courses. This will particularly impact those courses in the 525-625 range in 2022. We could see a small drop in marks for courses in that range with a possible drop of up to 10 points for some of those courses.
For courses in the 400-520 range in 2022, we might see a small increase in marks. Again this might be due to the profile of marks in Maths, but also with some of the other optional subjects. This year we could see a slight increase of 5-15 points for those courses.
Time will tell if these predictions come true, and hopefully every student will get the course they are hoping for as the nervous wait for CAO Round 1 offers commece. (Wednesday 30th August). I’ll have another post looking at the CAO Points profiles, so look out for that.
Ora-lytics 
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