Today would have seen over 60,000 Leaving Cert students start their exams today; a moment altered due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
In place of the official states exams, students have been asked to register for predictive grades through gov.ie
Speaking to Debbie on The Takeover last night, Jack Deacon from Spunout.ie explained what the portal students registered for last week.
"What the registration last week was [sic.] was registering for the portal.
"You will still be asked whether you want to opt in or out of calculated grades.
"There's lots of individual circumstances where you might want to opt out; it might be if you're repeating and if you're doing just one or two exams if you're going for teaching or something like that".
Deacon continued to give a breakdown of predictive grades.
"The first step to that is that teachers themselves will decide on the students that they have grades.
"They will look at past classwork, assignments, other exams results and use that past performance to decide what score they would except the student to get in an exam.
"They will take all of the grades for their class and rank their students in order of level of achievement that they'd expect from each student".
"The schools review the grades on a higher level so all the teachers who teach that particular subject, say it's Maths, all of the teachers who teach Maths in that school will come together and review the scores given to all the students across 6th year taken that subject and finalise the class rankings and the overall list", he continues.
"This is to make sure that there's oversight on each individual teacher and make sure that the estimates were done right".
After this, the marks will be sent on to the Department of Education who reviews the grades sent in by the schools where the grades will be standardised based on previous grades from each school.
You can listen to the full interview below.
