AI cheating among Irish students tripled in 2 years: What this means for parents and teachers
Last month, I sat at my kitchen table after dinner grading Junior Cert English essays for the after-school tutoring group I run out of my Dublin home, a half-eaten packet of Kimberley biscuits next to my laptop and my 16-year-old niece scrolling TikTok on the couch. The third essay I pulled up stopped me cold: it was a 600-word response to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time that had nuanced analysis of neurodivergent representation I’d only ever seen in university-level discussion posts. The student, a 15-year-old who struggles to finish a 200-word answer in class, turned this in two days after we’d assigned the topic.
I called her in after school the next day, and she admitted it straight away: she’d jotted down two quick bullet points after our class, but she had a regional soccer semifinal that night and couldn’t stay up to write the whole thing. She plugged her notes into ChatGPT to “clean it up” and turned in what it spit out. She didn’t even think it was that big of a deal, she told me, twisting the strap of her soccer bag between her fingers. “Everyone does it for homework, miss.”
A week before that, the State Examinations Commission released new data confirming exactly that: the number of Irish students caught cheating with AI has tripled in just two years. Most cases aren’t from the high-stakes end-of-year Leaving Cert or Junior Cert exams, held in locked exam halls with no devices. They’re from in-school continuous assessment, the daily coursework that counts toward final grades for many subjects. That lines up with what I see every week: this isn’t a problem of kids trying to scam their way into a top college degree. It’s a problem of overwhelmed kids looking for a way out from under a mountain of work.
After that conversation with the 15-year-old soccer player, I asked my niece, who’s in fifth year prepping for her Leaving Cert, how common it really is. She didn’t even look up from her phone. “Almost everyone uses it for something. If I have four homework assignments and a mock test to study for, why would I spend an hour writing a full Irish homework essay that my teacher will just glance at and mark out of 5? I use AI to get it done fast, so I can study for the stuff that actually matters.”
I used to get angry about that, back when I first started tutoring 10 years ago. I thought any unapproved use of AI for schoolwork was cheating, plain and simple. But after a few years of seeing this play out again and again, I’ve changed my mind. Most kids aren’t setting out to be dishonest. They’re just drowning. Irish secondary students carry more pressure now than I ever did: constant assessment, points race pressure for college, extracurriculars that they’re told they need to pad their CAO applications, and most have part-time jobs on top of all that. When you’re getting five homework assignments a night and only have three hours after school to get them done before you have to go to work or practice, something has to give. AI is the easiest something to give.
That doesn’t mean we just look the other way, of course. But the solution isn’t banning phones from classrooms or failing every kid who gets caught using AI. I’ve tried a few small, concrete changes over the past year that have made a big difference for my students, and I’ve shared them with my sister for my niece too.
First, I stopped assigning full finished essays or reports as homework. Now, homework is just the prep work: three bullet points of your main argument, one quote you want to use, and one question you have about the topic. We write the full assignment together in class, where I can see how each kid is thinking and writing. That means AI can’t do the core work for them, because the homework is just the thinking part, not the polished final product. If they use AI to brainstorm their bullet points? That’s fine, we talk through it in class anyway.
For parents, the biggest change I recommend is how you respond when you find your kid using AI. Don’t start with “why did you cheat?” Start with “which part of this was too much for you to handle tonight?” When my sister found my niece using AI to write her Irish oral presentation last term, she initially stormed in and took her phone. But after we talked, she went back 10 minutes later and asked that question. My niece broke down and said she’d spent three hours studying for a biology test that day, and she just couldn’t make herself memorize 10 extra phrases for Irish. They made a deal: my niece writes the main points of the presentation herself, and my sister helps her polish the Irish grammar and phrases, no AI needed. It took 20 minutes, instead of the hour my niece would have spent stressing, and she still learned the material.
I also let my students use AI openly for specific tasks, like editing or coming up with alternative angles if they’re stuck. The rule is they have to show me the original AI output, then show me how they changed it to make it their own. That takes away the secrecy: if it’s allowed for some things, there’s less incentive to sneak around and use it for everything.
Last week, I caught a fifth year boy in my group turning in a full AI-generated history report on the 1916 Rising. He had a national rugby tournament that week and had left the report to the last minute. I didn’t fail him. I just sat with him after school for 45 minutes and had him rewrite each paragraph in his own words, talking through each point as he went. We worked out a plan for his next big assignment: he’ll send me a bullet point outline three days before it’s due, so I can help him split it into small chunks he can fit around his training.
It’s not a perfect system. I still miss some AI-generated work sometimes, and some kids still choose to cut corners when they’re stretched too thin. Schools across the country are still figuring out how to update their rules for this new reality, and the points race that pushes kids to overload themselves isn’t changing any time soon. But so far, asking instead of accusing, and adjusting the work instead of banning the tool, has cut the number of unapproved AI-assisted assignments I see by more than half in my group. That’s not a bad start.
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