Katie Murphy is the innocent victim of a deeply flawed system, argues Brian Mooney

Katie Murphy is clearly one of the brightest students in the Leaving Cert Class of 2005. But she has been failed by both our system of assessment at Leaving Cert level and our college place allocation system.

Despite receiving an astonishing 570 points in the Leaving Cert, she still did not have enough to do medicine. That, in itself, is a sad indictment of our system for medical education.

But the story gets worse. On viewing her Leaving Cert paper, she noticed she had crossed out a question worth six marks, which was legible and correct. She applied for a recheck and got her upgrade.

This is deeply disturbing. She should have secured these marks during the initial correction process. The exam regulations specifically state that all work that is legible must be corrected.

If this was an isolated case, it could be put down to the fallibility of any human system. But is is not.

A remarkable 23 per cent of rechecks led to an upgrade, according to figures published earlier this month.

There is another scandal. Colleges being unable to offer places to students such as Katie who have the points they need.

In medicine, only 16 students are now entitled to places in UCD, and 11 students are entitled to places in the Royal College of Surgeons. The other medical schools are also unable to offer places to all qualifying students.

The situation is very unfair on Katie and others like her.

Katie Murphy is now almost two months into the academic year. UCD says it cannot offer her a place as these are already allocated.

But UCD is not the villain of the piece. The real scandal is the cap of only 308 places on the number of training places made available to Irish and EU students every year.

The colleges are paid €7,000 per year by the State for these places, most of which are awarded to Irish students. There are about 500 other places available, but these are given to non-EU students who pay over €24,000 per year to the colleges in fees.

Katie Murphy is an innocent victim of a deeply flawed system.

She is the victim of an exam system which must have serious quality control problems if the original marks in over one-in-five papers have to be upgraded.

But the bigger scandal is that she cannot gain the place she - and her own hard work - has gained at third-level. There are scores of other students in her position. The situation in medicine is near breaking point.

Only 143 first-time Leaving Cert students received an offer in medicine in 2005. Sixty-five Leaving Cert students also got an offer.

Sixty-five students who had sat the exam on only one occasion previously, but not in 2005, got places this year. I would wager that the vast majority of theseare the 2004 victims of this flawed system - ie my suspicion is that they sat the exam once in 2004, got an upgrade but were not let in in 2004, so got a deferred place in 2005.

Is there a case for a legal challenge to a system where you have the points for your course but cannot secure a place?

A number of years ago, a group of students entitled to places in law in UCD were permitted to start into the programme, following a single solicitor's letter.

The rules of the present system of allocation have never been tested in court and it will be very interesting to see how the principal of natural justice would be applied to the present situation.

Clearly, we need a root and branch review of our entire assessment system. This should run in parallel with a review of the system for the allocation of highly sought after college places.