Colleges may have to create 1,000 more places to facilitate students who were wrongly marked down in this year’s leaving certificate due to mistakes in the calculated grades system.
According to the Irish Examiner, Minister for Higher Education Simon Harris said at the Fine Gael parliamentary party meeting last night that higher education institutions may need to free up 1,000 more places to meet increased demand.
The calculated grades errors appear to have affected around 6,500 students. Exact figures, however, have yet to be released.
The government said yesterday that it will work with the CAO and higher education institutions to facilitate students moving into a higher preference course after they have received their correct results.
No students will see their points decrease as a result of the errors in the calculated grades system.
In a tweet last night, Harris said: “Just want students from the Class of 2020 to know we will move mountains to help ensure extra places needed are provided.”
He added that he told the Higher Education Authority that “everyone must and will pull together to find solutions”.
“We will get there. Must be solutions focused”, he said.
Trinity yesterday said that it will try its best to find places for leaving certificate students who were incorrectly graded under the calculated grades system if the government fully funds them.
“This is about helping those students awarded new grades”, Provost Patrick Prendergast said in a statement to The University Times. “We are prepared to do anything in our power to find places for them if those places are fully funded by Government”, he added.
Speaking to The University Times, Catherine O’Mahony, a Trinity media relations officer said: “It goes without saying that any students admitted to Trinity can remain in Trinity.”
Polymetrika International Inc., the external contractors responsible for coding the standardisation process, told the Department of Education last week that two errors had been discovered in the same part of the code.
According to Polymetrika, the first error was in a single line of code, which affected the way a candidate’s junior certificate results were included in the standardisation process.
Junior certificate results in Irish, Maths and English are included in the standardisation data, along with the results for the candidates next two best subjects. The error instead included candidates’ two weakest subjects instead of their best. Polymetrika has since corrected the code.
The department discovered a second error while performing checks related to rectifying the first error. This error was found in the same section of code programmed by Polymetrika.
The second error mistakenly factored in candidates’ junior certificate results in Civic, Social and Political Education into the data model. This coding error has also subsequently been corrected.
Trinity’s Schools of Medicine and Dentistry last month said that they will not be offering extra places for incoming freshers this year.
At the beginning of September, the government announced 1250 additional CAO places for “high demand” courses such as medicine, law, and engineering. Higher Education Minister Simon Harris subsequently announced a further 800 places, following the announcement of the highest leaving certificate results in history.
