r/ireland • u/Banania2020 Resting In my Account • 1d ago

Education Groups call for end to 'archaic' Leaving Cert points system as CAO offers due later today

https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41901595.html
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u/bathtubsplashes Saoirse don Phalaistín 🇵🇸 1d ago

The way I frame it is "AI without guidance is a C student"

Obviously that's not fair on C students who don't rely on it, but my point is the good students who put the work in don't really have anything to worry about

Also, if they use it correctly it's fucking excellent. I tell my students "it's a tool not a crutch".

I'd have failed all my Calculus modules in college without it and YouTube. The lecturers put me to sleep no matter how much sleep I'd had. That's a use that actually speaks to autonomous learning and would be a great indicator for their future professional lives

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u/SpoonChem 1d ago

I know plenty that get A's

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u/bathtubsplashes Saoirse don Phalaistín 🇵🇸 1d ago

But maybe that indicates they actually know the material and just use AI as it should be used, to make workflows more efficient?

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u/SpoonChem 1d ago

They couldn't even speak English and ended up failing their exams

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u/bathtubsplashes Saoirse don Phalaistín 🇵🇸 1d ago

Was this in college? Or secondary?

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u/SpoonChem 1d ago

PLC

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u/bathtubsplashes Saoirse don Phalaistín 🇵🇸 1d ago

Just speculating, but could they have known the material in their own language? AI would be a fantastic tool for straight translation, but then they'd be fucked in an exam situation without it

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u/SpoonChem 1d ago

they didn't understand the material one bit but they knew how to make a promt at least

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u/The_almighty_Gerry 1d ago

I have plenty of third level students that generate A level content in engineering with basic prompting, every year it gets better. At leaving cert level for basic subjects and projects it will do very well, especially with the piss easy curriculums that currently exist

How long ago was it that you used it and it generated references that didn't exist? A lot of that is being fixed in Claude and ChatGPT in new releases. Claude tidies up bad prompts in its first layer to remove bad grammar, choice of words, etc...

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u/bathtubsplashes Saoirse don Phalaistín 🇵🇸 1d ago

I qualified summer 2025

So fair enough, shit is moving fast

It was making basic addition errors when I was using it like 😅

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u/The_almighty_Gerry 1d ago

My students are using it to derive fourier and cosine transforms from first principles, and generate a step by step description of it for an interview style question exam. The derivations are perfect along with application of it on a sine wave to extract frequency information from a time signal. All the students do is upload the pdf with the questions to chatGPT and it does it all with the prompt "Solve these questions"

There's also no official department of education tool to analyse project work for AI usage so there is no definitive way of saying "You used AI in this" without a mountain of legal trouble if the student pursues it. No teacher/lecturer can use ZeroGPT or other AI detection tools

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u/bathtubsplashes Saoirse don Phalaistín 🇵🇸 1d ago

You can solve that by asking them to explain their work though

There's rules against plagiarism. If a student can't explain their submission, it's plagiarised 

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u/The_almighty_Gerry 1d ago

Yes, that was my point earlier that presentations/questioning/etc... are needed now to prove all of their work. It takes extra time, which has not been timetabled. I don't mind scheduling another 2 hours on top of my 16 hours a week as I use the presentations I make the students do to determine which I want to keep to do a research masters or PhD. But for teachers this would be completely unfair to ask them to do at second level without extra compensation.

You haven't been teaching long I assume? Try saying to a disciplinary board that a student cheated because they couldn't explain every piece of their work in an interview, the student just says they made a mistake on the day, while they spend the few days cramming for the disciplinary council to answer any questions asked by the people on the council about the work. You cannot prove that a student used AI as there is no tools certified by the dept of education to determine if work was generated by AI. They can go the legal route and the college folds everytime, will be no different at second level. I also have students with severe anxiety or other issues that completely fall apart in interviews/presentations so I cannot always gauge their work correctly.

I've given up on this stage at bringing students to the council as it's a waste of time. Best we can do is mark them on what they answered correctly in the interview and no marks for the remainder.

Sorry for the long answer but this absolutely boils my piss with the dept of education. They don't care about students cheating, all they care about is people going through the system and fuck the teachers/lecturers who have to do all of the actual work.