CAO Points 2023 – Slight Deflation

Posted on August 31, 2023 Updated on August 31, 2023

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.