The Central Applications Office (CAO) will issue offers under Round Two tomorrow (Wednesday, September 23).

These offers will be available to view on the CAO website from 10:00am. The reply date by which these offers must be accepted is Friday, September 25, at 12:00pm.

Offers are then issued on a weekly basis to fill any remaining places.

The closing date for accepting Round One offers was last week (Wednesday, September 16).

It has been a critical number of weeks for many third-level hopefuls after the disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic to the Leaving Certificate exams.

In Round One, the CAO issued 78,950 offers to 53,815 applicants. These offers consist of 47,162 Level 8 course offers and 31,788 Level 7/6 offers.

There was an increase in applicants receiving offers this year, as in 2019, there were 51,513 applicants that received an offer.

Eileen Keleghan, CAO communications officer, has asked applicants to “carefully consider any offers received in this round”. She added that one of the common queries received each year relates to the order of preference.

If an applicant received a lower preference offer in Round One, they can have accepted this offer and it will not prevent them from receiving an offer of a course higher up on their courses list in Round Two if a place becomes available and they are deemed eligible.

Leaving Cert Students

Leaving Cert students received their results through the calculated grades process due to the disruption to the usual examination process by Covid-19.

The overall number of students due to sit the examinations in 2020 was 60,419.

Of those, 57,569 students followed the Leaving Cert (Established) Programme, of which 13,470 followed the Leaving Cert Vocational Programme.

A further 2,850 candidates followed the Leaving Cert Applied Programme.

A number of agriculture-related courses increased in points, as was expected due to the average marks across all subjects and at all levels in the Leaving Cert having increased on average by 4.4% on last year.

Some of the Level 8 Agricultural Science course points for 2020 compared to 2019 include:
  • University College Dublin: 456 (2020); 425 (2019);
  • University College Cork: 496 (2020); 473 (2019);
  • Waterford Institute of Technology: 377 (2020); 378 (2019);
  • Institute of Technology Tralee: 308 (2020); 331 (2019);
  • Letterkenny Institute of Technology (Agriculture): 307 (2020); 300 (2019).