How the CAO Application Works for a Canadian Student

What the CAO points scale actually measures

The Central Applications Office (CAO ) processes undergraduate applications to Irish universities and colleges. For students who sat the Irish Leaving Certificate, CAO converts each subject grade into points using standard bands, from H1 down to H8 at higher level and O1 down to O8 at ordinary level, then adds your best six subjects together. A points bonus applies for higher-level mathematics. The resulting scale runs from 0 to 625, and courses publish a minimum points cutoff that shifts a little each year based on how competitive that year's applicant pool turned out to be.

Why your Canadian grades do not plug into that same scale

The points formula above is built specifically around Leaving Certificate grading bands. There is no official CAO conversion table that turns a Canadian high school percentage average, a CEGEP DEC or an R-score into a CAO points equivalent. Instead, Irish universities publish separate entry requirements for non-EU and international applicants, stated in terms of your own qualification, such as an overall grade average with specific subject minimums.

Your application is assessed by the university's international admissions office against that published standard, not ranked against the pool of Leaving Certificate students competing for CAO points on the same course. This is a genuinely different process, not just a different number on the same scale, so treat what points do I need as the wrong question for a Canadian applicant and what is the non-EU entry requirement for this specific course as the right one.

Applying through CAO as a non-EU applicant

For many standard undergraduate courses, non-EU applicants still submit their application through the CAO online portal alongside EU applicants, listing course preferences the same way. The difference is what happens after submission: your file gets assessed against the course's stated non-EU minimum entry requirement rather than slotted into the Leaving Cert points ranking. Application fees and deadlines for non-EU applicants can differ from the standard EU/CAO timeline, so check the current figures directly on cao.ie before you plan around them, since both are reviewed each application cycle.

When a course skips CAO entirely

Some high-demand professional programs run their non-EU applications completely outside the CAO system. Medicine is the clearest example: at RCSI , EU school leavers apply through CAO and sit the HPAT admissions test, while non-EU applicants, including Canadians, apply directly to the university, using Atlantic Bridge as the common application service if they live in Canada or the United States, without CAO or HPAT in the picture at all. Other health science and some high-demand professional courses at other universities can run a similarly separate non-EU route, so never assume a course works through CAO just because most undergraduate courses do.

A checklist before you apply

1. Check the specific course page at each target university to see whether it takes non-EU applications through CAO or requires a direct application to the international office instead.

2. Gather your transcripts early and compare them against the course's published non-EU minimum entry requirement, not a points cutoff.

3. Confirm whether an English proficiency test applies to you. Canadians educated in English are usually exempt, but confirm this with the specific university rather than assuming.

4. Get the current non-EU application fee and deadline directly from CAO or the university's international office, since both are set fresh each cycle.