Why Irish Student AI Cheating Has Tripled In Two Years: A Teacher’s Practical Perspective
The weak coffee in my staffroom mug was already cold by the time 16-year-old Conor and his mom sat down across from my desk last week for parent-teacher conferences. Conor stared at the scuff on his black school shoe, picking at the edge with his thumb while I explained why his recent Macbeth essay, submitted for 30% of his Christmas term grade, came back with a zero instead of the H1 he’d been expecting. The line about “proto-feminist subversion of Jacobean gender norms” was the giveaway. When I asked Conor what years the Jacobean period covered, he couldn’t tell me.
When his mom recovered enough to ask why he’d do it, he just shrugged and said, “Everyone does it for the small assignments. I have three tests next week, I didn’t have time to write a 1000 word essay on my own.”
That line stuck with me, because it lines up perfectly with the new data from QQI that dropped last month: the number of Irish students caught cheating with AI has tripled in just two years. When I started teaching English at a Dublin secondary school 12 years ago, the only cheating I saw was a kid passing a note with math formulas during a test, or copying a friend’s homework over lunch. Three years ago, I caught one case of AI cheating a term, if that. This year, I’ve had four already just halfway through the term.
Conor stayed back after his mom left, and we talked for 10 minutes by the copy machine while the next family waited outside. He told me he doesn’t even think of using AI for daily homework as cheating. “It’s like using a calculator for math, isn’t it?” he said. “My dad uses AI to write work emails all the time, why can’t I use it to knock out an essay so I can study for my chemistry test?”
He’s not wrong, in a way. The pressure on Irish students right now is unlike anything I saw when I was doing the Leaving Cert. College acceptances are getting more competitive every year, point requirements for most courses have gone up 30 points in a decade, and most kids are juggling school, extra grinds, part-time jobs, and unspoken expectations from parents and teachers that they’ll get into a top course straight after secondary school. AI didn’t create the pressure – it just gave kids an easy way out when they’re stretched too thin.
Most of the cheating we’re seeing isn’t kids trying to scam their way into a H1 out of laziness. It’s kids using AI to check off three or four minor continuous assessment assignments so they can free up 10 hours a week to study for the final exams that count for 80% of their grade. I had a girl last month, Aoife, who told me she used AI to finish her geography field project because she’d had a panic attack the week before from studying for mocks, and her mom told her just to get it done so she could sleep. She got a B on the project, but got a D in the mock exam because she didn’t actually learn the material while working through the project. That’s the real problem, not the cheating itself – kids are cutting corners that end up hurting their own learning, because they feel like they have no other choice.
I’ve made a few small changes to my own classes over the past year that have cut down on AI cheating a lot, and they’re things parents can adapt at home too, no fancy detection tools or extra work needed. First, I stopped counting full take-home essays as 30% of the grade. Now, kids can do all their research and drafting at home, but they have to come in and write a 15-minute in-class outline of their argument, then explain three key points to me before they get a grade. It takes 15 minutes of class time per assignment, and it immediately weeds out anyone who didn’t actually do the thinking themselves. For parents, the equivalent is simple: instead of just asking if your kid finished their homework, ask them to tell you one thing they learned from that assignment before dinner. It takes 30 seconds, and it shows if they actually engaged with the work, even if they used AI to help edit it or brainstorm ideas.
Second, if I suspect a kid is using AI to get through all their work, I don’t start with a punishment or a lecture. I start with asking them how much work they have each night, and where they’re feeling stretched. Last term, I had three 5th years who were all using AI for most of their English homework, and when I talked to them, it turned out all three were going to math grinds three nights a week, Irish grinds on Saturdays, and had part-time jobs on Sundays. We worked with their parents to cut back one grind each, and all three stopped using AI for homework after that. For parents, if you find out your kid is using AI to cheat, the first thing to say isn’t “how could you” – it’s “you seem really overwhelmed right now. What can we take off your plate to make this easier?” That’s a concrete first step, not vague advice to just “be supportive.”
I also think we need to stop treating AI like it’s all bad. I let my kids use AI to brainstorm essay topics, or fix persistent grammar mistakes, just like I let them use a dictionary or a spellchecker. The line I draw is that they have to do the actual thinking and the core writing themselves. That’s a line I talk through with my class at the start of every year, so everyone knows where I stand, no surprises.
We still have a lot to figure out. Last week, another parent told me she doesn’t know whether to let her kid use AI for homework or ban it entirely, because all his friends use it and she doesn’t want him to fall behind on the workload. That’s a fair question, and I don’t have a perfect one-size-fits-all answer for her. The number of kids using AI to cheat will probably keep going up as it gets easier to access, and it’ll take schools a while to adjust how we assess work to match the new reality.
But what I know for sure is that this isn’t a problem of kids being more dishonest than they used to be. It’s a problem of too much pressure, and a new tool that’s showing us exactly where the cracks are in how we expect kids to work and learn. Right now, the small steps – checking in on how much they’re actually carrying, adjusting how we count grades, and talking openly about what AI is okay to use for – are making more of a difference than any big crackdown or lecture. We’re still figuring it out, day by day, same as everyone else.
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