Anyone applying for higher or further education through the Central Applications Office (CAO) this year is being reminded that the normal closing date for applications is at 5.15pm on Monday, February 1st.
From February 5th to March 1st applicants will be able to amend their course choices for a €10 fee, while the final change of mind period, which is free of charge, will run from May 5th to July 1st online.
In 2020, 72,973 students applied to the CAO, with 64,378 making applications to Level 8 courses and 29,817 applying to Level 6 and 7 courses.
Among Level 8 applications, health courses received the highest number of first preferences (12,362), followed by business and administration courses (8,261), and nursing and midwifery (4,909).
🚨📆CAO NORMAL CLOSING DATE 1st Feb 5:15pm 📆🚨 Although applications can still be made after this, restrictions apply. HEAR/DARE applicants AccessCollegeIreland are encouraged to start the process NOW. @CareersPortal have compiled a list of key points 👉👉https://t.co/tK0BLLhpSr
— St. Louis Monaghan (@StLouisMonaghan) January 30, 2021
For Level 6 and 7 applicants, business and administration was the top preference for 5,964 applicants, while welfare (3,468) and engineering (3,350) courses were second and third most popular respectively.
Anyone who misses Monday’s normal closing date for applications will still be able to apply to the CAO but will have to wait until the late applications facility opens on March 5th. This facility will remain open until May 1st.
Following Monday’s CAO deadline, some students from the 2019/2020 Leaving Cert class will receive results from written exams on Tuesday at midday.
The students who chose not to receive calculated grades last year, or those chose to sit exams in addition to their calculated grades, will receive their results online. Over 2,000 sat written exams last November.
Any student who received calculated grades, but subsequently achieves a higher result in the written exams will have their grade updated, but if a student gets a lower grade in the written exam than was given to them in the calculated grades process, they will retain the higher grade.
