The Education Minister has congratulated the 55,000 candidates who sat the Leaving Certificate this year and who are getting their results today.
Schools are now handing out envelopes around now while they will also be available online from midday href="https://www.examinations.ie/index.php?l=en&mc=ex&sc=er">here
Many students will be calculating their points levels with just days to go until the first round of CAO offers is released on Monday.
A total of 55,815 students sat their Leaving Cert this year.
Overall 3 students earned 9 ‘A1′ grades, 10 scored 8 ‘A1′s, and 150 students around the country managed to get 6 or more A1′s giving them the magic number of 600 points.
This is down about 3.2% on the number last year.
Of these 52,589 sat the Established Leaving Cert and Leaving Cert Vocational Programme and 3,226 sat the Leaving Cert Applied Programme.
The highest number of students ever sat higher level maths in 2012.
22.1% of all maths students took the higher level paper compared to 15.8% last year.
The Minister has welcomed this dramatic increase.
The other main change this year was in Irish where the oral component of the exam which now accounts for 40% of the marks awarded.
The number of students taking higher level Irish has also increased by almost 11% compared to last year.
Minister Ruairi Quinn spoke about the results with Breakfast here on Newstalk.
