Universities look set to offer a number of high points courses on random selection – or a lottery – today due to the high volume of top grades linked to this year’s Leaving Cert results.

The bunching of student on high grades has made it difficult to differentiate between candidates for some prestigious courses such as medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine, business, management, engineering and others, according to higher education sources.

This year’s Leaving Cert results were artificially inflated to match results of recent years in order to ensure students are not placed a disadvantage when competing for college places against students from previous years.

Despite these challenges, it is expected that close to 60 per cent of CAO applicants will secure their first choice college place this year, while up to 85 per cent are likely to secure one of their top-three places.

There are a total of just over 83,500 CAO applicants this year – down slightly on last year – and most candidates must wait until 2pm to find out if they have secured a college place.

CAO points requirements are typically a reflection of supply and demand for college places, as well as the grades of applicants seeking places on specific courses.

Physiotherapy, Dentistry and pharmacy courses have seen the largest growth in application numbers on last year, according to the latest figures from the CAO.

However, health, business and arts courses remain the most popular courses for third-level applicants.

This is based on “change of mind” data, which captures students’ course choices as of a July 1st deadline.

More than half of applicants amended their course listings in the May-June period.

Overall, health courses are the single most popular area (71,652 applications) this year, followed by business and administration courses (69,729), arts (51,624), social and behavioural sciences (36,777), and engineering and engineering trades (30,213) for level eight or honours degree courses.

Some of the biggest year-on-year growth in application numbers were in physiotherapy (+22 per cent), dentistry, which includes dental nursing and hygiene (+10 per cent), pharmacy, which includes pharmacy technician (+9 per cent), and primary education (+8 per cent).

The largest year-on-year decreases were in transport services (-38 per cent), hygiene and occupational health services (-16 per cent) and agriculture (-12 per cent).

Languages, personal services and secondary education courses were all down 10 per cent compared to last year.