IT’S EITHER THE most important indicator of what you’ll do with your life that you’ll ever have – or else a minor blip on the way to pursue whatever career you want.

The Leaving Certificate exam began on Wednesday, with tens of thousands of students around the country setting pen to paper to determine their final results. And let’s not forget about the almost 60,000 students going through the Junior Cert at the same time.

Here are some facts and figures from the State Examinations Commission, which has responsibility for the gigantic operation of ensuring that everything goes smoothly with the exams. No pressure, so.

47.7 million - The number of A4 pages contained in the roughly 4 million examination papers which will be used in the Leaving and Junior Cert exams.

1.9 million - The approximate number of individual test items that will be submitted by students, including written exam scripts, art pieces, projects, portfolios and oral tests.

1 million - The approximate number of individual grades that will be handed out.

115,399 - The number of people who will be getting their exam results later this year.

13,244 - The number of appeals of grades at Leaving and Junior Cert.

90,000 - The approximate number of oral exams sat by exam candidates.

59,822 - The number of students sitting the Junior Certificate.

52,767 - The number of students sitting the Leaving Certificate exam this year.

6,549 - The number of examiners who will mark the papers (including 4,223 written examiners, 1,078 oral examiners, and 1,248 practical examiners).

4,734 - The number of superintendents who er, superintend at exam centres and make sure that people don’t do anything they shouldn’t do.

2,810 - The number of students sitting the Leaving Certificate Applied Programme.

578 - The number of people involved in setting the tests (including translating, drafting and setting the papers).

506 - The number of different tests there are in the exams (including orals, aurals, practicals, projects, portfolios, plus, of course, the written exam papers)

90 - The number of subjects which are being examined. There are also 15 non-curricular exam subjects being sat by a small number of students, mainly involving languages such as Latvian, Czech and Danish.

1 million kilosmiles - The relief you’ll feel on the Scientific Happiness Scale when you walk out of your final exam.

Best of luck to everyone doing the exams from all of us here at TheJournal.ie. You’ll be grand. 

Want more? Check out our previous ‘In numbers’ pieces >