TENS OF THOUSANDS of students received their Leaving Certificate results today. 

To be more precise, 58,787 people took exams in 2019 and will now be awaiting the release of CAO offers later this week. 

It’s the third year of the new grading system, so it should all need no explanation. While as ever the majority of students took the traditional Leaving Cert programme, 22% of students took the Leaving Certificate vocational course and 4.6% took the applied programme. 

One thing that hasn’t changed is the sheer volume of numbers and statistics involved. We’ve broken down the most important data from Leaving Cert 2019. 

Leaving Cert results in numbers

56,071 – The total number of students who sat the Leaving Cert this year. 

2,716 – The number of students who sat the Leaving Certificate Applied. 

697 – The number of people repeating the exam. 

28,373 – The number of female students who took the Leaving Certificate. 

27,698 – The number of male students who took the exam. 

1,679 – The total number of students taking an exam in a non-curricular EU language. This was a small increase on 2018. 

340 – The number of students who took the Romanian exam – this was the second most popular non-curricular language after Polish.

408 – The number of students who sat the Leaving Cert in Leitrim, the county with the lowest number of people taking the exam.

63 –  The number of students from Libya who sat the exam, where it has been offered at just one school since 1997. 

6 – The percentage of students who sat higher level Maths who got a H1.

5 – The number of students who got 8 H1s.

61 – The number of students who got 7 H1s. 

24.3 – The percentage of students who were awarded an O8 – the lowest grade – in ordinary level Physics and Chemistry. This was the highest proportion of O8s in any paper. 

54 – The number of students who took the Latin exam. Numbers have declined every year since 2017. 

6,605 – Agricultural Science remains popular. The number of students taking the higher-level exam increased slightly this year. 

0 – The number of students who got a H1 in Agricultural Economics. But no student got a H7 or a H8 either. 

9.1 – The percentage of students who received an O8 in ordinary-level Japanese – a jump from only 1.7% in 2017. 

168 – The number of students took higher level Arabic, an increase of 70% from 2017