When it comes to trying to address the disruption caused to the Leaving Certificate marking system by the pandemic, it's a case of 'damned if you do and damned if you don’t'.
While other jurisdictions have returned more or less to pre-Covid marking levels, nothing has been done here yet to address that grade inflation.
This year’s results - like those of the past two years - are a full 7% higher on average than the results obtained by students in 2019 and in previous years.
Does it matter?
Well, if you are a student applying to an Irish university from Northern Ireland or Britain it does, because your A Level results have not remained inflated in the same way.
But some of this year’s Leaving Cert students could have lost out if this year’s results had been allowed to return to pre-2020 levels.
Because if they had been left alone, with no post-marking adjustment, that's where they would be.
Some college applicants could even have lost out if this year's marks had been allowed to return to closer to those levels.
They might have lost a coveted college place to someone who did their Leaving Cert last year or the year before and held on to those artificially inflated grades.
Minister for Education Norma Foley had a choice and she choose to support this year's Leaving Cert students by maintaining the grade inflation that crept into the system over the course of the pandemic.
She was mindful of the fact that these students missed out on a lot as a result of the pandemic.
None of them sat their Junior Cycle exams for example, so these Leaving Certificate exams were their first State tests.
Norma Foley instructed the State Examinations Commission to fulfil her policy direction "that the overall set of Leaving Certificate results for 2023 should, in the aggregate, be no lower than 2022" and that’s what the SEC did.
This still leaves us with our conundrum; Do we bring results back to the level that they were at a number of years ago? And if so, how?
The universities are keen for this to happen.
They say it is difficult for them to distinguish the really strong students among their new intake if so many are getting H1s.
But some of those same universities would be well advised to mind their own business, because Higher Education Authority data shows that grade inflation has been rampant across some of their own campuses in recent years and before that too.
It's difficult to know what to do. "It’s tricky," one State Examinations Commission official told journalists at a briefing yesterday, depending on what approach you take "there are different impacts for different groups".
For now this can has been firmly kicked down the road.
