CAO Round 4: Offers to include applicants affected by Leaving Cert errors

The higher education institutions (HEIs) and Central Applications Office (CAO) have agreed to include offers arising from corrections to calculated grades along with Round 4 offers this week.

Round 4 offers will be available to view online from 10:00am this Thursday (October 8). Successful applicants will also receive an email and a text message if they have selected this option on their application form.

Round 4 will also include applicants who have applied for – and been deemed eligible for – ‘Available Places’ courses, as well as other applicants who were deemed eligible because a place has become available and they are next on the waiting list for that particular course.

Speaking about the Leaving Cert upgrades, CAO’s general manager, Joseph O’Grady, said in a statement issued this afternoon (Monday, October 5): “On receipt of the data from the Department of Education on Saturday, the CAO processed the corrections to the Leaving Certificate grades over the weekend.

“On Sunday, HEIs began the process of reviewing the affected applications. Where possible, HEIs will authorise the CAO to issue offers to applicants who have been upgraded and, as a result of this upgrade, are now eligible for a new offer.”

Applicants who receive a Round 4 offer have until 3:00pm on Tuesday, October 13, to accept the offer if they wish to do so.

For applicants who have already received an offer in a previous offer round, CAO provides the following advice:

Accept the new offer by the ‘Reply Date’ of Tuesday, October 13, at 3:00pm if you prefer this course to the one that you have already accepted – this action automatically cancels your previous acceptance;
If you do not wish to accept the new offer, you can simply do nothing and your previous acceptance will still stand;
If you wish to defer your current offer do not accept it now, you must contact the admissions office of the offering institution immediately by email with the text ‘Deferred Entry’ in the subject line of the email.

Last week, Minister for Education Norma Foley announced that due to errors in the calculated grades process, 6,500 students received a grade lower than should have been received and up to 7,200 grades being affected.

Speaking about the two errors in the calculated grades process, Minister Foley said in a statement:

“These are errors that should not have occurred. However, the error will not disadvantage any student.

“On Wednesday last, the secretary general of the Department of Education and Skills told me that a mistake had been spotted by the Canadian company developing the statistical software for our students’ data.

“The company name is Polymetrica International. At that point, here’s what we knew: We knew one line out of 50,000 lines of code had a mistake in it. We knew that mistake would impact on the results of some students.”