Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 10 November 2020

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills

Leaving Certificate Calculated Grades 2020 and Preparations for Leaving Certificate 2021: Department of Education

Mr. Dalton Tattan:

If there are students who were underestimated, where the school-estimated marks were lower than what they ought to have received, that was corrected through the standardisation process. About 4% of students did move up, and that was a small proportion of those who moved down. There are students, however, who feel that the standardisation process did not give them a fair representation. Their argument, if we take some of those legal cases, is that the teachers' marks or the school-estimated marks were at a higher level than the results the standardisation gave them. Those students feel aggrieved and some have chosen to litigate the issue, and that is their entitlement. On the evidence we have seen, however, what came through was that there was a high degree of overestimation. That was particularly the case in some schools, where the results bore no relationship to the typical results in those schools in previous years.