The Level 7 Route Nobody Puts on Their List
The CAO form holds two lists. Ten spaces for Level 8 honours degrees take all the attention, and below them sit ten more for Level 7 and Level 6 courses. Most applicants leave that second list half empty or blank, and the reason has little to do with strategy. Two months on from the 2025 offers, any guidance counsellor can name students who wish they had filled it.
A separate race, run in parallel
The Level 7/6 list is independent of the Level 8 list. Each one works the same way on its own: an offer kills the choices below it on that list, while the choices above stay live for later rounds. The two lists do not touch each other. You can hold a Level 8 offer and a Level 7 offer in the same round and pick between them, and accepting a Level 7 place does not block a Level 8 offer arriving in a later round. Our offers waterfall guide covers the mechanics in full.
Filling the second list costs you nothing and leaves your Level 8 chances untouched. It sits in reserve for the day you might need it, and on a results morning that goes wrong, it is the difference between options and a blank page.
The ladder to the same destination
Many Level 7 ordinary degrees ladder into a Level 8 add-on year. Finish the Level 7, meet the progression requirements, and the add-on converts your award into an honours degree. A student who missed the points for a Level 8 course in business or engineering can enter through the Level 7 version and come out the far end with a Level 8 parchment, a year or so behind the original plan.
Confirm the route before a course goes on your list. Colleges publish their add-on options and the results they expect, and a call to the admissions office settles anything the website leaves vague. The second list earns its place when each entry has a checked path forward, with the steps known in advance.
About the embarrassment
The obstacle is status, in the schoolyard sense. Sixth years compare lists, and a Level 7 course carries less shine in the canteen than the same subject as an honours degree. Writing one down can feel like announcing that the main plan might fail. Parents feel a version of the same thing at the kitchen table, and the half-empty second list becomes a quiet pact that the family will not entertain a fallback.
Offers day reorders those feelings within the hour. The student with a full second list holds an offer in a subject they chose, with a confirmed ladder to honours. The student with a blank one holds whatever the Level 8 points reached, or an unplanned year out. By second year of college the entry route fades from conversation, and the parchment at the end reads the same.
If you are the parent here, your tone sets the price of writing those courses down. Treat the second list as a plan with a timeline rather than a consolation prize, and your son or daughter can fill it without feeling they have conceded defeat in March on a result that arrives in August.
Filling it well
- Search Level 7 and Level 6 courses in the subjects already on your Level 8 list, starting from the course search.
- Confirm the add-on route to Level 8 on each college's website, or by phone.
- Order the list by honest preference. The order decides which offer arrives, same as the Level 8 list.
- Use the spaces you have. An entry on line nine of the second list has rescued more than one September.
The 2026 application has not opened yet, so this advice costs you a notebook page for now; check cao.ie for this year's dates when the form goes live. If you are a 2025 applicant still working out where you stand after the later rounds, our Round 2 guide explains what each course's record shows, and the add-on ladder stays open through next year's form.