Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Senator for raising this issue. I am pleased that Rebecca Carter has started her course. She is in University College Dublin, UCD, and I am happy for her. I certainly do not want to see students having to go to the courts to exercise their rights on this. The judgment was just issued yesterday and it is 44 pages long, so the Senator will understand that my Department and the State Examinations Commission, SEC, need time to absorb that judgment before any comment will be made on the detail of it. However, what has happened immediately, as the Senator said, is that the SEC board instructed its executive to review those very timelines which the Senator outlined. As he rightly said, there is a 16 day period before students view their scripts and then there are another five days before they appeal.

There is the possibility for rectification, which happens immediately. However, rectification, as I understand it, is only allowed by the SEC where it is a figure added up on the front of the script. If there are issues inside in respect of one question being weighed against another question the SEC does not regard these as a simple addition in this sense because there can be revisions in the course of quality control of correction that can result in changes, so if it is at that detailed level within the script, a full examination of the script can be required. The SEC is an independent body so it is obviously for it to decide that and not for a Minister to issue a diktat. The SEC has a simplified procedure for rectification where it is a totting error. In the other cases, it has the procedure the Senator mentioned.

The higher education institutions and the SEC are meeting today. The objective will be to shorten that period from 15 August to 10 October. While I appreciate the independence of the SEC and that it has to make sure that whatever it does is robust, I am confident those timelines can be shortened in some dimensions. To be fair to the SEC, it is particularly robust when looking at re-examinations. It applies more intense quality control with the re-examination of one in five scripts being appealed as opposed to one in 20 in the general scheme. The SEC is rigorous and it is defending the robustness of the system. The norm for all colleges was to accept someone who got an upgrade in their examination but what changed this year was that UCD decided that it would only allow such people to continue their course if they had a change by 30 September. That was prior to the date when appeal results would come out and that clearly had implications for students. UCD has since indicated that it is lifting that requirement so that students in a similar position who get an upgrade will be able to continue-----