In the Dark

Last week I wrote a post about the loose ends of the academic year, one of which concerned my PhD student Aoibhinn, who passed her viva voce examination way back in May, who had to submit a bound copy of the thesis to the relevant office by September 6th so that her degree could be ratified by Faculty and Academic Council. She has now done that, and in the process kindly made me an extra copy of the Authorized Version to put on my shelf:

It will be easy to find on my shelf because it’s a different colour from the others. Aoibhinn will be off to Germany for a postdoctoral fellowship after her conferring ceremony in October.

In subsequent post I mentioned a plethora of meetings to take place this week, all of which went off without much incident. The various Departmental Examination Boards did their business and students will receive their results on September 5th. Students involved in these will be moving on in various ways: some will be graduating, some progressing to the next year of their course and others – though not very many at all – will be leaving without qualifying.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Ireland, students in the Class of 25 have today been receiving their school Leaving Certificate results. As expected, the proportion at the highest grade (H1) is down significantly compared 2024. On the other hand, the total number of students taking  Leaving Certificate examinations is significantly higher  than last year. You can find all the national statistics here.

How these nationwide effects  will work their way through to undergraduate admissions at Maynooth remains to be seen. Applicants will get offers through the CAO system next week; the points required by each higher education institution should be available online on Wednesday 27th. The Irish Times traditionally publishes a pull-out supplement showing all the offers for all courses at all universities across the sector the following day, i.e. on Thursday 28th September.

By the end of next week, therefore, we’ll have some sort of an idea how many students we will have entering the University in September 2025 and can begin moving on to the next academic year. One thing I’ve already got sorted out – way ahead of previous years – is my teaching timetable for Semester 1. Usually I’ve been happy if I had this before the first week of term! My new timetable makes Tuesdays and Thursdays my heaviest teaching days, but gives me Wednesday free for research and other things that I’ve started planning already.

This entry was posted on August 22, 2025 at 11:23 am and is filed under Education, Maynooth with tags Aoibhinn Gallagher, CAO, Central Admissions Office, Examination Boards, Leaving Certificate, Leaving Certificate 2025, Maynooth University, PhD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.