Black marks for exams body

The State Examinations Commission has recently faced two legal actions: one by a student whose marks were wrongly added up, and another by an Irish company that lost out to an English firm for the contract to mark papers online

Pupils preparing to sit their Leaving Cert: the State Examinations Commission has been ordered to pay the costs in a High Court case over its procurement process Picture: Rollingnews

Making changes to the Leaving Cert is always a tricky process because it is the country’s most important exam.

The State Examinations Commission (SEC) has been preparing for several years to make a radical shift in how the exam papers are corrected, by moving from paper-based marking to online marking for both the Leaving Cert and the Junior Cert.

But its handling of the tender process for that change led an Irish company ...