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Four Leaving Cert students compare their results - and their overall points score - outside the Catholic University School on Leeson St in Dublin. Sam Boal/Photocall Ireland
Points Race
Explainer: A beginner’s guide to the CAO Points system
Some of your loved ones might be awaiting a college offer – through a system that mightn’t make sense to many. Here’s our crash course.
8.30pm, 18 Aug 2013
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This post was originally published on the 18 August 2012 but republished here as the CAO points for 2013 are being revealed tomorrow.
TOMORROW MARKS a big day in the lives of thousands of young people in Ireland, as the first round of college placement offers are distributed by the Central Applications Office.
The offers will dictate, for many, what they will study for the next few years – as well as where they might live, and how much college might cost them – or whether they may have to go back to school for another year to secure the grades they need.
For most, though, it brings an end to the Leaving Cert experience – as students take their grades and book their places in the courses that they hope will lead them into the working world.
While the CAO points system has become a rite of passage for many Irish people, it’s also something which can mystify the other people in their lives, who might never have gone through a similar system themselves.
So, for those baffled by the system through which their children, grandchildren, siblings, nieces, nephews and friends are going, here’s our guide to how the whole thing works.
No points without a leaving
Let’s start at the beginning: there would be no ‘points’ without a Leaving Cert in the first place. CAO Points are calculated based directly on a student’s grades in their Leaving.
Most Leaving Cert subjects are taken at two levels – either Higher Level (‘honours’) or Ordinary Level (‘pass’). (A couple of subjects are also offered at Foundation Level, but they do not count for the purposes of CAO points.)
While every exam in the Leaving Cert does ultimately result in a percentage grade, this isn’t what students are given on results day. Instead, they’re given a letter grade which corresponds to the percentage score that they got.
Those grades are outlined on this table:
These grades then correspond directly with the points that you get for each grade. For each grade, a fixed number of points are awarded. For ordinary level, these are allocated based on this table:
Solving extra problems means earning extra points
For higher level subjects, the points are exactly the same - except you add 40. (This is the reward that a student gets for opting to sit a tougher exam.) So, for an honours subject, a D3 gets you 45 points while an A1 will get you 100.
From last year, colleges are also offering bonus points for honours Maths.
The idea behind this is reasonably simple: the CAO only considers your best six subjects for points purposes, while many students actually take seven subjects - meaning they'll be doing one subject which they know will not count for the purposes of getting into college.
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Knowing this, many students striving for top grades - and who knew Maths wasn't their strong point - simply opted for the ordinary level paper in order to concentrate their efforts elsewhere. This, in turn, has led to fears about the mathematical capabilities of Irish school-leavers.
In order to try and redress this, from 2012 the system offers 25 extra points for those who keep up their Higher Level Maths - giving them an advantage over other students who are happy to concentrate on other subjects.
So, going back to the second table above, when you're dealing with Higher Level Maths you can first add 40 points because it's a Higher Level grade, and then add a further 25 points because it's Maths. So a D3 in honours Maths now gets you 70 points; an A1 gets you 125.
This means that previously, where the maximum points score a student could get was 600, it's now 625.
The CAO auction, and what points actually mean
What many people misunderstand about the points attached to certain courses is that they are not a measure of the difficulty of the course. Although many of the high-points courses do tend to be among the toughest, the two aren't directly linked. This is why students are always told to fill out their CAO forms by ranking courses based on genuine preference and not based on their actual difficulty.
It might help to think of CAO points as a kind of special currency, created only for use in the college applications process.
Put it this way: if you get a B2 in an honours subject, you 'earn' 80 points. Your six best subjects might altogether 'earn' you 400 points. You then use this money in an auction to buy your place on a course.
That, in essence, is what the CAO does: it runs an auction. This is best explained with an example.
Let's pretend there's a college called 'TheScore.ie Institute of Sportology', which runs a course called 'Premier League Liveblogging'. Let's pretend there are 50 places in this course.
Now, let's say that only 40 CAO applicants put this course at the top of their list of preferences. In that case, there are more places than applicants - and everyone gets in. (On CAO lists this is marked as 'AQA' - All Qualifiers Accepted.)
But if there are 100 applicants with Premier League Liveblogging as their first choice, obviously we have a problem - because the course can only take half of them.
So how does it sort them out? By ranking applicants based on their points. This is the auction - the 50 applicants with the best CAO scores are the ones who will be offered a place.
The other 50 will instead have to make do with a lower preference on their form - they'll be offered whichever course closest to the top of their list, which they have also fulfilled the other entry criteria for (some courses, like those in Science, will demand certain Leaving Cert grades in the appropriate subjects).
High points doesn't necessarily mean high difficulty
The whole point of this explanation is to underline that the points needed for the course aren't simply based on how tough the course is - it's merely based on the results of the people who want to get in.
The points value that you'll see listed beside the name of a course on the newspapers, or online, is merely the point beyond which applicants are going to be successful or not - it's the 'minimum price' determined by the CAO auction.
The first round of CAO offers - revealing the results of the first round of auctions - will be released on Monday. Further rounds will be offered over the next few weeks as extra places become available - if, for example, some people don't take up their offers or colleges increase their capacity.
To all those awaiting their offers, and to those standing by their sides: good luck.
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Ive hired a few people in my time… My two weirdest were a 14 pager that included a copy of the cert you got for ‘graduating’ primary school and another that had a whole list of scores, titles and achievements from world of Warcraft/dungeons and dragons type games
My dad once got a CV in the post, included with it were two sheets of toilet paper with the words “I’m willing to start at the bottom” scrawled across them.
Had to design the odd CV in a printers. Once had a girl come in and asked could she put her photo on the front page. Bad enough. But then she wanted same picture blown up as a watermark on each page! Horrific.
Photos on CV’s are an extremely common occurrence in continental Europe. A potential employer here in holland actually complained to me about the fact that there wasn’t a picture in mine.
Most random thing I ever saw was an old friend of mine who listed breathing as his only talent. You can guess how many job offers that earned.
Oh that’s nothing… That regularly happens. I used to get requests from an assistant secretarial officer in a combo of blue, pink and purple comic sans.
Another was from a gent who was in his late fifties. His CV was 7 pages long in excel format listing every job he had since the seventies. Every job was short term (from a couple of days to one month). A list of over 200 jobs
that he had held.
I used to love seeing CVs in the 90s and the 00s that proclaimed that they had a provisional driving license. I used to laugh to myself that this was basically saying they could fill in a form.
My other favourite was some guy who had Father’s occupation: Company Director; Mother’s occupation: Homemaker. Why is that relevant?
maybe not so much a weird thing on my CV but got asked to describe a difficult situation I had when I worked in the bookies in an interview for a graduate office job, so i told them (in a very straight forward run of the mill tone) about a guy who lost a bet and came back threw a giant cement block (not brick, was massive thing dug out of the ground from a nearby building site) at us twice (luckily we had a bullet priof screen thar barely scratched) and how we called the gards and they did nothing (said guy drinking accross the way in the pub all day) and then later on when i came back from my dinner break the other 2 were shaking as he’d been back with a gun (fake in the end but they didnt know that!). so finished up with, yeah difficult situation only way we could resolve it was by giving the gards a statement and letting them do the rest
The 2 interviewers had no idea how to react and awkwardly went ok then asked me about a difficult situation I had in a different job! got the job anyway!
A girl in college with me had a 5-page CV. She’d never had a job. First page had ‘Private and Confidential’. Only other item I recall was ‘Sixer in the Brownies’.
Think she got a job in FF head office.
I had a chap give me a pretty cringey three pager with professional DJ and producer and such like. The third page was him on a boat in Thailand. Wearing a straw pork pie hat. Shirtless.
I included writing plot for a live action roleplaying game on my cv. Teamwork, meeting deadlines, writing succinct and memorable briefs for people. Totes relevant skills.
a Yank friend of mine, 50, sent me his cv to pass on. very qualified guy. his achievements listed when from most recent all the way back too. ……….. wait for it…………………………………………. wait………………………………………… THE FAST PAPER ROUND IN BURLINGAME, SAN FRANCISCO.
I asked him, ‘you do realize your are a fifty year old man.. right. ?????????
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