THE CAO faces renewed controversy after students accused it yesterday of releasing the results of their HPAT exam for medicine prematurely and without notice.
Last night the CAO, while apologising for any confusion among students, insisted no 2011 HPAT results had been issued online.
Instead it said it had completed a “test-run” of results over the Easter based on last year’s figures.
The results of the HPAT exam are issued to students in late June after the Leaving Cert exam.
Last night one Leaving Cert student said he was “astonished’’ to find what appeared to be his HPAT results on his own CAO account last week. This, he said, had put additional pressure on him to achieve better results in the forthcoming Leaving Cert exam.
The CAO said the test-run was necessary because of the additional points for students taking higher level maths in the Leaving Cert this year. It had not envisaged that students would be checking their CAO accounts at this time.
Admission to medicine is based on a combination of Leaving Cert points and scores in the HPAT aptitude test, taken by 3,000 students in February.
Up to 300 additional points are available from the HPAT, and this is added to the Leaving Cert points score.
The publication of the HPAT results on the CAO website last Friday has become a very live issue on social networking sites.
One student who contacted The Irish Times wrote: “There was a lot of confusion. Some students will become quite worried or even overconfident heading into their Leaving Certificate exams.’’
He also wrote: “No warning was given to candidates . . . of such a ‘test-run’; and no such test-run was noticed in previous years; if these were randomly distributed results from last year, random results would be expected, however no student expecting to score, say, 200 appears to have received, for instance, 100 – the results posted certainly appear to be genuine. They were removed a couple of hours after they appeared.’’
Another student, Aidan Coffey of Enniskeane, Cork, has called on the CAO to clarify the situation, which he said was “undoubtedly causing unnecessary worry to students’’.
Last August the CAO suffered an attack on its website that restricted access for thousands of Leaving Cert students checking the first round of course offers.
The website was hit by what is believed to be a denial-of-service attack – it makes the service unavailable to intended users – shortly after the first round of college offers were published.
The full service was restored later on the same day.
In early 2007 the CAO’s website struggled to cope with a rush of last-minute applications and some students had difficulty in submitting an online application.
Responding to the controversy the then minister for education Mary Hanafin explored the possibility of extending the CAO deadline to assist students.
