In the 1997 movie How to Cheat in the Leaving Certificate, a group of students broke into the Department of Education to steal papers so they could get a leg up on a system they felt was unfair.
Remarkably, given the title, the movie predates the widely accepted norms of search engine optimisation, but the scheme wouldn’t need to be as complex in this day and age. This week, tens of thousands of students received their first offers for third level less than a week after getting their results.
A modern reworking of that film by Graham Jones would struggle to match the high-stakes nature of stealing from a government department. Instead, artificial intelligence (AI) would be at the heart of the plot.
The Leaving Cert has always been a high-stakes affair, at least that’s what society has made it for those sitting it. For most people reading this, the points of vulnerability in its system were straightforward to guard against. Invigilators walked the aisles and the papers, essentially the key data, were all safely under lock and key. It was a crude but robust form of security.
The introduction of research projects to the most discussed exam in the State was meant to be an improvement. Beyond the on-the-day elements of papers or orals/aurals, a holistic view of the student’s learning is now recognised for parts of their grade in certain subjects.
The arrival of generative AI punched a hole quite clearly in the crude security of the Leaving Cert, squarely at the point of the project. In subjects such as applied maths or design and communications graphics (DCG), the guidelines by the State Examinations Commission provide briefs on what the students must attempt.
Per the system as intended, these students conduct progress on this work throughout part of the school year under the supervision of their teachers. The teacher must sign off that they believe it is the work of the student.
That is an obvious flaw in the system. Teachers already have substantial workloads but, even if we lightened them, the nature of supervision is wholly different from an exam hall.
In the latter, a group of students is invigilated for a few hours with little to no room for deception. With continuous assessment, a teacher being responsible for 50 students across subjects is quite normal and they are expected to manage this aspect for months. Add back in the primary parts of their role and the room for exploitation is clear.
The Irish Examiner researched these gaps back in December and found that generative AI tools such as ChatGPT could, in 30 seconds or so, deliver a top-scoring project.
Testing in the field, as in getting people to actually cheat the Leaving Cert to check for flaws, isn’t really an option. There’s the small issue of it being a crime. In theory the State could hire an external body to try it and grant some form of exemption for purposes of stress testing but that’s rather unlikely to happen, despite it really being something the State ought to do.
It’s not just the integrity of an exam that gets overhyped in importance by our collective society. The pressure of the Leaving Cert is never going to decrease we hardly want to make it worse?
That’s what the AI creep will do if left unchecked. Much as with doping scandals in some sports, cheating won’t be about getting an edge but will prove to be a necessity just to compete.
Students already seek out grinds, or are encouraged to seek them out by parents, to go up a notch. Now, with a ready-made tool to game the system at hand it’s impractical not to consider using AI.
They’re dealing with a security threshold that can easily be overcome; they can be confident in the results, and save oodles of time, which can be deployed on other subjects.
There is, as ever, the nuclear option. That would be the Government doing away with projects entirely. That’s great so long as you only value on-the-day performance at the height of pressure when the vast majority of the future working lives of those sitting the Leaving Cert experience won’t mimic such conditions.
The holistic goals of project-based work, which is expanding, make sense. The result for third level and the resulting workforce will be a broader reflection of the populace. More practical guard rails, such as a presentation element with a defence of the work, need to be put in place and they should have been planned before the roll-out.
When Jones released How to Cheat in the Leaving Certificate, which is available on his YouTube channel, it was a protest against the excessive pressure associated with the exam. We all but guarantee that it gets worse if we don’t address the generative AI issue staring us in the face.
