A Leaving Cert Arms Race

I often hear people talk about how the Leaving Certificate examinations have gotten easier over the years, and it got me thinking; are the youth of this fair isle growing more intelligent (at least at test taking) year on year, or. is the Leaving Certificate becoming easier? I suspected the latter, and with my arbitrary hypothesis clutched in hand set off on an adventure into the world of Leaving Cert statistics.

Within minutes of diving into the data (beginning in 1995) it became obvious that something strange was going on. Year after year the percentage of students scoring more than three hundred points was going up, while the numbers scoring low were shrinking. This ‘point inflation’ seems to have been fed recently by the introduction of bonus points for Maths, but has been going on for at least the last eighteen years.

A comparison of the number of students scoring in the top and bottom tier shows just how much more generous the examiners are these days.

Now, it could of course be possible that students are simply more diligent these days, but I doubt it. Consider two things, 1, the Leaving Cert is to at least some extent a zero sum game, and 2, this has been happening year on year, for nearly two decades.

A colour chart showing the shift in student numbers at each points tier.

I’m not begrudging students, or having a moan about this, but I do find it bizarre that such a drift has happened, who does it really benefit? The students? Hardly. The Department of Education? Perhaps.

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