Leaving Certificate 2020 Calculated Grades: Statements Dail Éireann — 2020-10-01 ============================================================ Norma Foley (FF), Kerry In regard to the Deputy's confusion as to the reason the leaving certificate applied aspect was involved, he will appreciate the leaving certificate applied is a two-year programme and the fifth year aspect of it was being uploaded. That is why that was happening at that time. The Deputy is correct that it was at that time the error was identified. In terms of the processes, oversight and so on, I have said previously, and I say so honestly again, I am not a statistician. I am not an expert in psychometrics or examination testing. Therefore, I can only give the Deputy the layman's version as I understand it. My understanding, without any expertise in this area, is that there was oversight of the process by the national standardisation group, the independent steering committee and the international external reviewer and, most important, the Education Research Centre was running the data in parallel with the process being run by the contractor. That is my understanding of what has happening at the time. An error occurred and it was identified. Something went wrong. We are in this position now because something went wrong. I accept that. I have acknowledged that and once the error became known, positive and proactive action was taken. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2020-10-01/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:48:38+00:00 Sitting date: 2020-10-01