What It Actually Takes to Get an H1 in the Leaving Cert

An H1 is the top Higher Level grade — 90% or above, worth 100 CAO points on the official CAO common points scale, the maximum any subject can contribute to your points total. It's also gotten harder to come by. In 2026, H1s made up 10.1% of all grades awarded, down from 12.1% in 2025 — a drop of nearly a fifth in a single year, according to CourseCompass's analysis of the 2026 CAO points data.

Why H1s got rarer in 2026

This wasn't an accident of one particularly tough cohort — it reflects a deliberate, ongoing policy change. The State Examinations Commission's post-marking adjustment (PMA), the standardisation process applied after marking to keep results broadly consistent with previous years, was reduced from 5.8% of grades adjusted upward in 2025 to just 4% in 2026. That's part of a multi-year plan to gradually unwind the grade inflation introduced during the pandemic years, when a much larger PMA was applied. In plain terms: results are being marked closer to how they were pre-2020, and H1s specifically have thinned out as a result.

It wasn't uniform across subjects, either. In 2026, Higher Level Maths H1s fell to 8.1% (from 11% in 2025), Higher Level English to 4.3% (from 5%), and Higher Level Irish to 10% (from 11%). English H1s in particular have always been rare — under 5% most years — because of how much of the grade rests on extended, subjectively marked writing.

What actually separates an H1 answer

There's no secret formula, but a few things consistently show up in official exam guidance and how marking schemes are actually structured:

Answer the exact question asked. Markers are marking against a specific scheme tied to the specific wording of the question — a well-written answer to a slightly different question than the one asked will lose marks no matter how good the writing is.

Show your work, not just your answer. In subjects with structured marking schemes (Maths, sciences, accounting), full marks are very rarely awarded for a correct final answer alone — the marking scheme allocates marks across the steps, so an unshown method leaves marks on the table even when the answer is right.

Use the command word properly. "Discuss," "evaluate," "outline," "compare" and "explain" are marked differently — answering an "evaluate" question with pure description, for instance, caps how many marks are available no matter how accurate the content is.

Avoid careless errors under time pressure. A meaningful share of lost marks in any given exam aren't knowledge gaps — they're arithmetic slips, misread questions, or answers that run out of time. Practising full past papers under real time constraints, not just topic-by-topic revision, is what actually catches this.

Know the marking scheme, not just the material. The SEC publishes past exam papers and marking schemes publicly on examinations.ie, along with Chief Examiner Reports for many subjects, which describe in detail what separated stronger and weaker responses in previous years. These are free, official, and genuinely underused by students who stick to revision notes alone.

A realistic caveat

An H1 in every subject isn't the goal for most students, and it shouldn't be — your CAO points come from your best six subjects, so a strong, consistent spread across your strongest subjects usually matters more than chasing a single H1 in a subject you're not suited to. Talk to your subject teachers about where you're realistically closest to the next grade band up; that's almost always a better use of remaining study time than trying to force an H1 in a subject where you're currently mid-table.

If you're still weighing up which subjects and levels to focus effort on with your CAO course goals in mind, that's exactly the kind of decision worth running past your guidance counsellor — or a structured interest and strengths assessment — rather than guessing. CourseCompass's CAO points calculator is also a useful way to see, in real numbers, what a given grade spread actually adds up to before you decide where to focus.