Why AI Cheating Among Irish Students Has Tripled: Practical Tips For Parents And Teachers
The PTA’s instant coffee had gone lukewarm, and I’d eaten three of the leftover shortbread biscuits by the time Aoife’s mom knocked on my Dublin classroom door last week for parent-teacher meetings. She slid into the plastic chair across from my desk, pulled out her phone, and tapped up two documents, her voice tight: one was a messy, half-edited draft of Aoife’s Yeats essay, typed up with crossed-out lines and spelling mistakes, based on the scrawled handwriting she’d done at the kitchen table. The other was the final copy Aoife turned in last Monday. It was flawless. It opened with a line about “the socio-cultural contextualisation of occult mysticism in 20th century Irish poetry” and Aoife, who’d spent our last class debating whether Yeats was just weird into horses, couldn’t explain that line when her mom asked. What does that even mean? Aoife had shrugged, and admitted she’d let AI rewrite the whole introduction.
I wasn’t surprised. A few weeks back, the Department of Education released new data showing confirmed incidents of AI-related cheating among Irish second and third-level students have tripled in just two years. I’ve counted 11 confirmed cases in my own classes this year, compared to three two years ago, so that lines up perfectly with the national numbers.
A few months back, Cillian, a 6th year who plays on our school’s senior Gaelic football team, turned in a 2000-word research project on the impact of the 1916 Proclamation on modern Irish politics that read like it was written by a university lecturer. When I pulled him aside after class and asked him to name the three primary sources he cited in his opening paragraph, he stared at his shoes for a full minute before admitting he’d written zero words of it. He had a county match the next weekend, two other coursework projects due the same day, and his little sister had been sick the week before, so he’d missed two study periods. “I just couldn’t catch up,” he said. That’s the line I hear more than any other, not “I wanted to cheat” or “I don’t care about school.”
A lot of parents I talk to see the headline about tripling cheating and panic, assuming all kids are walking around scamming their way through exams and turning into dishonest people. But that’s not what I see. Most of the kids I catch aren’t bad kids. They’re overwhelmed. The Leaving Cert is still one of the most high-stakes school exams in Europe, and post-pandemic, so many of them are still playing catch-up on material they missed during lockdown online classes. They don’t even all see it as cheating. A lot of them tell me they think AI is just a newer version of what we did when we were in school: using SparkNotes to get a quick understanding of a book, or copying notes from a friend when you missed class. It’s just easier to hide now, and it does the whole assignment for you in two minutes.
After Aoife’s mom and I talked that day, we came up with a small plan that’s worked really well so far, and I’ve shared it with a dozen other parents since. Instead of banning AI entirely at home, they agreed Aoife can only use it after she writes her full first draft by hand. She has to show her mom that first draft before she types it up, and if she uses AI to fix grammar or tweak a clunky sentence, she has to highlight every change AI made and explain why she kept it. That takes five minutes, tops, and it means Aoife still does all the thinking work, she just uses AI as a spell check, not a ghostwriter. For parents who don’t know how to use AI detection tools or don’t want to get into a big fight over blocking apps on their kid’s phone, that’s way easier than any high-tech solution. It’s just a small shift in what you ask for when they do homework at the kitchen table.
I’ve adjusted my own assignments too, instead of relying on AI detectors that are wrong half the time anyway. Now, for every take-home essay or coursework project, 25% of the grade is the 10-minute in-person check-in we do halfway through. They have to bring their notes, tell me what their main argument is, and answer one or two questions about their sources. If they can’t do that, they don’t get to turn in the final project for full marks. It doesn’t add that much extra work to my week, and it cuts down on full AI cheating by more than half, because you can’t fake that conversation if you never thought about the topic yourself.
Last week, I caught a third year boy who used AI to write his short story for the Christmas assessment. He told me his golden retriever had died the week before, he couldn’t focus long enough to write a single paragraph, and he didn’t want to get a zero. I didn’t fail him. I told him he could rewrite it over the Christmas break, no penalty, as long as he wrote it himself. He turned it in last week, and it’s this raw, messy story about walking past the dog’s empty bed every night and finding his old tennis ball in the back of the coat closet. It’s not perfect, but it’s his, and it’s the best short story I’ve read all term.
The tripling in numbers sounds scary, I get that. But most of that growth isn’t because kids got three times more dishonest. It’s because AI is easily available now, and more schools are looking for it, so we’re catching more cases. Pressure on kids has gone up too, so more of them turn to it when they feel stuck.
We’re still figuring this out, honestly. Some days it feels like we’re one step behind the new tools kids are using. But what I’ve learned so far is that yelling about moral failure or banning all AI doesn’t work. What works is talking about it openly, asking kids to show their work, and meeting them where they are. Most of the time, they just need a little help figuring out when to use the tool, and when to do the hard, messy work of thinking for themselves. We’re still learning, and that’s okay.
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