A-levels not favoured for medicine - Trinity

Trinity College Dublin has defended the way it allocates places to A-level students, despite claims this has led Leaving Cert…

Trinity College Dublin has defended the way it allocates places to A-level students, despite claims this has led Leaving Cert students to lose out in the first-round offers for its medicine course, which now requires 590 CAO points.

Under the new system, A-level students are assessed on four A-level results. However, Jan O'Sullivan, Labour Party spokeswoman on education, yesterday claimed the changes were negatively affecting places allocated to Leaving Cert students.

"Changes in the entry requirement for A-level students from the North were designed to reduce the advantage they had over Leaving Cert students," Ms O'Sullivan said. "However, the opposite has happened . . . the result is that students who worked extremely hard to reach the already extremely high standard have lost out."

A Trinity spokeswoman last night said: "The university is still in the admissions process but, in round one of the CAO, a majority of places in medicine was offered to Leaving Cert students," she said.

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"Trinity College offered more places in medicine to Leaving Cert students in 2005 than in previous years because of the changes to the A-level selection criteria."

Last January, The Irish Times revealed that Trinity had sent letters to A-level schools in Britain and Northern Ireland which "proposed that for each undergraduate course, a percentage of places will be reserved for A-level applicants". Trinity subsequently denied it was reserving any places for A-level students.