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Students may need up to 1,000 additional places in college due to errors in the calculated grades issued to thousands of Leaving Cert candidates.
Education Minister Norma Foley apologized Wednesday for coding errors that resulted in at least 6,500 students receiving a lower grade than they should have received.
She said that all affected students will be improved by at least one grade, the equivalent of 10 CAO points at a higher level, and every effort will be made to ensure that no candidate misses a college place to which they are entitled.
However, the final confirmation on the total number of affected students will not be known for several days, as the new checks continue on errors in the calculated grade system.
Higher Education Minister Simon Harris told a meeting of the Fine Gael parliamentary party on Wednesday night that these figures suggest that up to 1,000 additional places may be needed in universities.
Harris also said at the meeting that the CAO had confirmed that any affected student would be treated as a successful appeal and that a place would be secured at the university if available.
Resources
If no such space were available, Harris said he would put all the resources necessary to fund additional college places.
Third-tier colleges will meet on Friday to discuss ways to create additional seats.
Some university sources said there were serious doubts about whether additional places could be identified in high-demand courses like medicine or dentistry, and additional funding will be needed.
Harris said he hoped the full scale of the problem would be known next week, at which point students can receive new offers.
The revelations sparked a wave of criticism from opposition parties, demanding answers about why a week passed before the public was informed of the errors.
Labor education spokesman Aodhán Ó Ríordáin said the government had “sat” with the information for a week.
“The students were not told, the parents were not told, the opposition was not told,” he said.
Sinn Féin education spokesperson Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire said that students who had accepted offers to universities away from home due to faulty results would need financial help with costs.
Processed
Ms. Foley apologized for the errors and said updates will be processed as soon as possible.
“I want to say how sorry I am that this happened,” he said. “My immediate priority is to correct mistakes and their consequences so that students get the correct grades. That is happening right now and the next steps will be followed quickly. “
Coding errors were first identified on Tuesday night last week when Canadian company Polymetrika International Inc identified an error in a line of code for which it was responsible.
The error affected the academic profile of the candidates based on their performance in the Junior Cert.
Instead of using the students’ two strongest subjects, their two weakest subjects were used to build an academic profile for the classes.
As a result, some students received lower grades than they should have been.
An independent US company, ETS Educational Testing Service, has been contracted to review aspects of the coding to ensure there are no further errors. This job is expected to take “several days,” Ms Foley said.
He also defended the delay in making the errors public on the grounds that it took time to establish how many students had been affected.
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