The State Examinations Commission released a breakdown of this years Junior Certificate showing that girls continue to outperform boys at Junior Cert level, with more female than male students scoring 'A' grades in 18 out of 21 higher-level subjects this year, according to the 2017 results.
At higher level, the only subjects where boys outperformed the girls were mathematics, metalwork & environmental & social studies.
61,654 students sat the exams in total, 31,305 boys & 30,349 girls. This was a 2.3% rise overall in students taking the exam.
For the first time English was marked using a different system to the other subjects, using such terms as 'merit', 'distinction' or 'achievement'.
Another change in the marking is that there is no longer a failure grade in the Junior Cert with scores under 20 per cent deemed as 'not graded' and scores from 20% to 40% scoring a 'partially achieved' grade.
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So it's now impossible to 'fail' your Junior Certificate. And they wonder why they call it the 'snowflake generation'.
Home Economics demographics continues to be dominated by girls, with 16,475 girls taking the exam compared to just 2,397 boys. One third of the students who sat classical studies were female and over 85% of students who studied Material Technology were male. Technical Graphics was another male dominated subject with less than a quarter of the participants female.
