Gareth O'Callaghan: It's the learning that changes your life, not the results

The revamp of the Leaving Cert is unworkable because of AI, writes Gareth O'Callaghan

The exam style is due to be remodelled in the next four years, with each subject having a 40% project assessment and written exams in June making up the remaining 60%. File photo: Domnick Walsh © Eye Focus LTD

School teachers are familiar with the old proverb that students don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. Everyone has a favourite teacher from somewhere back in their younger years.

I remember that August afternoon when the head brother handed me the sealed envelope. I had been working earlier in the day, so I was the last of the class of ‘78 to receive my exam results. As I stared at it unopened, I couldn’t help thinking it had felt like a lifetime since I’d sat the exams.

I decided I’d wait until I got home to open it; that was until I spotted the lone figure in the school car park waving to me. It was Luke Brady, my English teacher. Here was a decent man who took the success of his students very seriously.

“Well?” he asked. I opened the envelope. B+ in honours English. A combination of shock and a sense of “I did it” made me giddy. The page was a litany of capital letters – even an A in Latin; but it was the English result that filled me with a deep pride.

Without his enthusiasm to walk the walk with his students, English would have just remained another one of those tedious exam subjects. As I chatted to the man who helped to shape a bond with a subject that has never left me, I realised my time in that place was done. 

But learning is never done. When I look back, I wish we had spent more time chatting.

As more than 61,000 students received their results yesterday, I was reminded of Luke, and how his skills laid the foundation for all I have ever read and written in my life. Only it’s far more.

He taught us not just how to read a novel, but how to read it abstractly through the eyes of its characters, to understand the unique impact on each of them that the evolving storyline was having, and how they in turn created each stage of that story with their own lives and challenges.

My experience of the exam is one I’ll never forget. It was nerve-racking in the days running up to the first paper, but once the jets had cooled 10 minutes after we were told we could begin, the panic settled into a tactical race against time.

Looking back, I was multi-tasking at a rate I’d never done before. As soon as I had scanned each paper for preferences and dislikes, I switched into logistics mode – allocating chunks of time to each section and its tasks, depending on how tough it was.

And then it was time to dive in, always casting a glance at the clock, making sure not to veer off the train of thought. Discipline, logistics, recall, patience – each of equal importance. I was coasting.

Did the exam make an impact on my life? In ways, yes; overall, probably not. I can’t recall the results for those subjects I didn’t care much for. My big regret is that I didn’t study hard enough.

Back then, there was nothing to support the student apart from the textbook and the guidance of the teacher – if you were lucky enough to have one who gave as much attention to the student as they did to the subject.

Unlike now, there were no text guides, or matching workbooks. As for Google classroom, that was still in the realms of time travel.

And yet, questions on this year’s English exam feel somewhat familiar. Questions are questions. It’s a matter of how time, with its cultural and technical changes, reshapes the content and discourse that makes them different. 

Leaving Cert reform and AI

Overall, the exam is as solid a test of knowledge and recall now as it was when I sat it.

Could the students of 2025 be the last to sit the exams as we have known the curriculum’s basic structure since it was introduced in 1925? I hope not.

The exam style is due to be remodelled in the next four years, with each subject having a 40% project assessment. Traditional written exams in June will make up the remaining 60%. This revamp will focus more on continuous assessment rather than a single end-of-cycle series of exams.

The review has been active since 2016. In this writer’s opinion, it’s not only unworkable, it’s a recipe for disaster. AI is already stifling traditional methods of education. Potentially it could bypass the teacher-pupil model within a very short time unless it can be thwarted.

AI is gobbling up the beautiful tapestry of the English language faster than I can say Shakespeare, along with centuries of classics by novelists, poets and philosophers who have dedicated their lives to its legacy.

Just imagine works by such literary giants as Austen, Orwell, Hemingway, Joyce, and modern counterparts like Donal Ryan, Eoin Colfer and Edna O’Brien, swallowed by the software equivalent of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and then effortlessly interpreted and spewed out for those who couldn’t bother consulting the original works. These are the times we live in.

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Recently I fed some information about myself into an AI chatbot. Within seconds, I had a three-page essay. Factually, it was lukewarm; but it also confused me in places with a Welsh footballer, a singer from Pop Idol, and a British politician.

Literature is at the heart of education. AI is a fault-riddled guide for cheaters to hard-earned knowledge. Why bother putting in the effort if it’s capable of doing all the work? That’s the potential problem with projects that are not carried out in the security of a classroom.

Many teachers have stated they won’t mark project assignments in the revamped system because there is no way of knowing if it’s the student’s own creation, or the effortless work of software.

AI could make a joke of an age-old exam that is still relevant; not just for personal development, but because the exam requires reasoning, logic, and interpretation skills – tools that AI can imitate.

Our Leaving Cert curriculum is the first major intellectual challenge in a teenager’s life. It shapes the ability to cope and manage academically. Take away the structures of discipline, logistics, recall and patience that it instils, and you leave your schooldays behind having achieved little.

There’s nothing to beat that sense of personal achievement when you score well in the exam, knowing that the hard work was all yours, and the late nights were worth it in the end.

Could the students of 2025 be the last to sit the exams as we have known the curriculum’s basic structure since it was introduced in 1925? I hope not. File picture

And let’s not forget the mammoth input by teachers of every subject over those five years. If they are overshadowed by a search engine that bypasses their own hard work and personal input, then it’s game over. 

Teachers take great pride in their students’ grades. Chatbots don’t. AI doesn’t care who we are because it doesn’t have a brain or a conscience. It also carries a moral cost. It’s no different to copying the answers of the student sitting one desk ahead of you.

Modelling a project based on AI-generated material is plagiarism. No ifs or buts. It’s the act of passing off someone else’s hard work as your own.

Luke Brady passed away in July last year. He left his students a great legacy. Unlike AI, he was a real class act. I often wonder what he would make of it all.