Going to College: First things first. Accepting your CAO offer on-line couldn't be easier, but an awful lot of you are having problems with your printers, writes Kathryn Holmquist.
If you cannot print out the receipt, or if the receipt does not for some reason seem to be complete, you should contact the CAO by e-mail at help@cao.ie.
(Or you may accept by post; get the inside back cover stamped to prove you have posted on time - which is Monday or Tuesday, if you want your acceptance to arrive in CAO by 5.15 p.m. on Wednesday, August 27th.)
The CAO rapid response e-mail is also useful for other questions - although you will be surprised how many of your queries can be answered by a careful reading of your CAO handbook. This includes page 4, which tells you all about how to defer.
Good news for some is that UCD has decided to allow incoming nursing students this year to defer, which is a welcome innovation that others should follow.
Guidance counsellors and students have been expressing serious concerns over the untimely manner in which new courses are approved by the Department of Education and Science.
For example, one student was extremely distressed after discovering that a course she was told had been cancelled, turned out to be available after all. The story here was that the course, applied social sciences DK071 at Dundalk IT, was listed initially in the 2003 CAO handbook although it was pending Department approval.
In November 2003, the course was cancelled. It was then verified again last Easter, then cancelled again in April. When the CAO sent out its round-robin update to guidance counsellors at about May 1st, the CAO and guidance counsellors assumed that the course was still cancelled. So the student took the course off her list and replaced it with something else.
But on May 28th, the Department of Education wrote to Dundalk IT, approving the course. Dundalk wrote to all school principals - although not to guidance counsellors. Dundalk IT also sent out a brochure and wrote to all students who had applied for the course stating that the course was on again.
Unfortunately, our student did not receive a letter because she had taken the course off her CAO list in the belief that it no longer existed.
Her guidance counsellor didn't receive any notification either. Nor did a second guidance counsellor who contacted The Irish Times about heartbreak over the same course.
Unfortunately, there is a waiting list of over 100 students for the course which has only 30 places. Dundalk IT would have liked to make more places available for students, like our friend, who were desperate to get onto the course, had the points, but thought it had been cancelled.
This type of compassionate action is against CAO recommendations. Students on the waiting list who are seeking second round places through the CAO wouldn't be too happy if "vacant places" were suddenly given on compassionate grounds to students who had not put the course on their CAO application.
Moral of this story: the Department of Education has to get its act together when it comes to approving courses in time for them to be properly listed on the CAO.
Also, institutions should follow a CAO recommendation that no course changes be made after May 1st, so that the CAO can send guidance counsellors a definitive update of deletions and additions and course title changes, etc.