Do Northerners with A levels have an advantage over LC students?

Did you know that it is 30 times easier to get 600 points using A-levels than Leaving Cert?

1/4% of Leaving Certers get 600 points
less than 1% get the 580 needed to get into Trinity Med
7% of A-Level students get 4 As = 600 points

Trinity get lots of Northerners applying for Med. What they do is recognise that 600 A-level points is equivalent to 530 points or more in Leaving. So they randomly select among these A-Level 600 pointers in the same proportion as 580 or more is to 530 or more, if you know what I mean.

The message is, if you want to do Trinity Med and are sure of your 580 points do it through Leaving, if the best you can hope for is 530 points do it through A-levels and you're in with a chance.

Re: You thought Irish speakers had advantage in Leaving what about the Northerners?

Sounds like sour grapes to me, this % you talk about just does not add up, Maybe they get in because they are more clever,Where did you end up going when you relised you were not clever enough for Trinity,Sounds abit like racism to me, They get in because they deserve it please deal with it,

Re: You thought Irish speakers had advantage in Leaving what about the Northerners?

Dodo I can see you would be a bit challenged in the points department no matter what system you used.

The point is that it is much easier to get 600 points in A-levels. Nothing racist about it. It is a statement about their exam system - hugely under attack and likely now to be reformed with A* being introduced.

Meanwhile Trinity in particular have a headache. They get all these 600 pointers from the North but know that is 7 times easier to get that the 580 needed to get on in Leaving. They try to solve it by using random selection. In a sense it is unfair on the truly good A-levellers as even with max points they are on a roll of the dice. Point I'm making is that if you have no hope of getting 580 Leaving Cert points A-levels is a possiblility to get in on much less ability.

Dodo these are facts, if I could do links I would link you to the Trinity formal website where they explain these facts.

Hi H,

Ive changed the title to reflect your specific point.

Why post it in LOS? It appears to me to be a perfectly good question for Non Financial Questions.

Ill move it if you like, or if you prefer you can leave it here.

aj
(moderator)