This page exists so you can judge whether to trust anything else on the site.
Sources
Every factual claim about dates, scoring or rules comes from a primary source, and the page carries a link to it. In order of preference:
- cao.ie for anything about applications, points scoring, deadlines and offer rounds. The CAO's own published documents outrank every secondary summary, including this one.
- The State Examinations Commission for anything about the Leaving Certificate itself.
- citizensinformation.ie for entitlements and general public information.
- Individual institution websites for course requirements, quotas and deferral policies, because these vary by college and no central source is reliable for them.
- accesscollege.ie for HEAR and DARE, and apprenticeship.ie for apprenticeships.
Where a widely repeated figure conflicts with the official source, the official source wins and the discrepancy is noted rather than quietly smoothed over.
Verification
Every page carries a last verified date. That date is the day the facts on it were last checked against the sources above. It is set by hand in the page's own file, not generated at build time, because a date that refreshes itself on every deploy tells you nothing.
If a page has not been verified in six months, the build warns about it.
Pages are checked on the CAO cycle rather than on a calendar: before the January deadline, before Change of Mind closes in July, and again when results and offers issue in August.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, it gets fixed and the verification date moves.
Corrections that change the meaning of a page are noted on the page. Typos and clarifications are not, because a changelog of comma fixes helps nobody.
To report an error, use the contact page. A link to the source you are relying on makes it much faster to act on.
What this site will not do
Predict points. Nobody can, and dressing a guess as analysis for an audience of stressed teenagers is not something worth doing for traffic.
Publish course points it has not sourced. Where real data has not been gathered, the page says so and shows nothing rather than filling the gap with a plausible number.
Imply official status. CollegeRoute is not affiliated with the Central Applications Office and does not use the word official about itself.