My daughter recently received an upgrade to a H1 on her English paper, which qualified her for her first CAO choice course. The university told her there are no further places available for 2025 but she can have a guaranteed reserved place in 2026. She was only two marks off the H1 when she got her results. Surely this is unfair?
It is a real dilemma for upgraded students: do they stick with their second choice, having settled in, or take up their first choice?
The only positive news I can give you is that if she chooses to remain with her second choice course for the year, she will not suffer an additional financial penalty if she accepts her first choice college offer for 2026. Hopefully, that makes her choice a little easier.
The fact that she was so close to getting a H1 may have had something to do with the State Examinations Commission’s “bell curve”, which helps determine what proportion of students get H1s, H2s, H3s, etc.
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My daughter got her top CAO choice after a recheck. I’m not sure she should take it
As you may know, grades soared in 2020 and 2021 when teachers generated a set of predicted or calculated grades for their students. The results were kept at these high levels – about 7 per cent ahead of pre-Covid results – until 2025, when a decision was taken to begin to gradually return results to more normal patterns.
When they settled on the final shape of their bell curve for 2025, it was only modestly down by 1.1 per cent on the 2024 results. Within that bell curve, thousands of students were being held just below the next grade band in specific subjects. If, as would occur at a third-level marking conference, all students within a fraction of one per cent of a pass or a 2.1 or a first were rounded up, this would have blown the bell curve model the SEC was aiming to achieve back up to 7 per cent above the 2019 norm, if not above it.
Historically, about 20 per cent of grades appealed are upgraded each year; those that tend to be upgrades are within that one per cent of next grade up. It may be maddening for you and your daughter but it’s how the system seems to work.
