More than 1,400 Leaving Cert results upgraded on appeal

More than 1,400 Leaving Cert exam results have been upgraded this year following appeals by students.

The move means students will see an increase in their CAO points, with some eligible for college courses which they narrowly missed out on.

The State Examinations Commission (SEC) said just over 5,600 students appealed a total of more than 9,800 exam results .

Almost 15 per cent - or 1,425 results - were upgraded. Just four results downgraded.

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The overall average rate of upgrades is down compared to last year when 17.5 per cent of appeals were successful.

The commission said this was mainly due to the introduction of 10 per cent grade bands in this year’s exam, compared with 5 per cent grade bands under the old system.

This has meant that many candidates appealing a result require much larger increases in marks to be awarded a higher grade during the appeals process.

Of the subjects where results were appealed, upgrades were most common in subjects such as agricultural science (22 per cent), biology (19 per cent) and geography (17 per cent).

They were less likely in subjects such as higher level Irish (11 per cent) and higher level English (12 per cent).

The only subject where results were appealed without a single upgrade was religious studies. Just 26 grades were appealed in this subject.

The commission said the number of appeals equates to 0.36 per cent of all 390,000 grades awarded to more than 58,000 students in this year’s Leaving Cert exams.

It said the appeal results have also been transmitted electronically to the CAO and will be available to students on the SEC website (www.examinations.ie) from noon on Wednesday.

All students who appealed their results were given an opportunity to view their scripts in their schools at the beginning of September before making a decision as to whether or not they wished to appeal the results of one or more subjects.

Students also had access to copies of the marking schemes for those subjects and could be accompanied to the viewing of their scripts by a parent or teacher.

In the processing of appeals, the commission says the work of each candidate was fully re-marked using the original marking scheme.

The re-marking was performed by a different examiner to the one who originally marked the work.

Students who are still not happy with the review may opt to view their re-marked exam scripts or refer their appeal to a panel of independent appeal scrutineers.

This panel is independent of the staff and management of the commission and its marking teams, according to the commission.