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I was interviewing the CAO Communications officer, Eileen Keleghan, for an Instagram Live recently. CAO applicants were allowed to send in questions during the interview. One of the most common questions was if a student does not achieve the entry requirements to a course, but they get the points, can they still be offered a place on their course?
There are three hurdles a CAO candidate must clear before they can be offered a course through the CAO. It is important to note these before finalising CAO order of preference now that the Change of Mind facility is open.
The first hurdle a candidate must overcome are the college requirements. This refers to the minimum requirements for entry into a university or college. For the majority of Level 8 courses, applicants must have two H5s and four O6s as a minimum. In Trinity College, applicants must have three H5s and three O6s.
Level 6 and 7 courses generally ask students to have a minimum of five O6s. This makes it important to have courses in your CAO level 6/7 list also filled out, incase students don’t meet the level eight requirements.
College requirements might also ask students to have passed certain Leaving Cert subjects. For all NUI universities (UCD, RCSI, University of Galway, UCC, Maynooth University) applicants must have passed their English and Irish (unless exempt) and for some of their more traditional courses, applicants will need to have a third language. Courses like Medicine, Law, Arts, Humanities and Commerce require a pass in a third language at either Higher Level or Ordinary Level.
Trinity College requires students to have passed English and another language (this can be Irish) and Maths. Foundation level Maths is accepted for entry to Trinity for a lot of their courses. University of Limerick is similar to Trinity while DCU requires students to have English or Irish and Maths. The majority of Technological Universities will require students to have passed English or Irish and a pass in Maths to meet the college requirements.
The second hurdle an applicant must clear are the course requirements. Primary Education courses for example will ask applicants to have a H4 in Irish. If the applicant meets the college requirements and they have the points but they got a H5 in Irish they will not be offered the course. This is one of the more common queries I get after the CAO offers come out. Applicants will ask why they have not gotten the course even though they have the points? One of the reasons for this could be that they have not met the course requirements.
The final hurdle a CAO applicant must clear before being offered a place on a course are the points. After applying to the CAO applicants are put in an order of merit list based on their points. The first person to be offered a place on the course will be the person who has met the entry criteria and has highest points. The offers will continue down the order of merit list until all the places have been offered. The points that the last applicant, who has been offered a palace on the course, are the points that people see when they look up CAO points for each course.
