Letter to the 'Irish Times' on AI
I have a letter to the Editor in today’s ‘Irish Times’ (subscribers only; screenshot at bottom). I’m putting it here too, since the way it was punctuated is slightly confusing, so I’ve made it clearer below. Paragraph 4 is by Daisy Christodoulou, from her Substack post yesterday. Links added for interest.
The last line points to the fact that it is very easy at secondary level to protect against AI: you just make sure all work to be assessed for high-stakes qualifications is done under supervised conditions without any online connection. This does not have to be an exam. You just need some resourcing for appropriate devices if work is not handwritten.
Sir, – The Senior Cycle Redevelopment Implementation Support Measures document recently issued by the Department of Education addresses the threat of AI to the integrity of Leaving Certificate examinations by proposing the setting up of a “taskforce”.
The reformed Leaving Certificate commences in September. As Prof Áine Hyland pointed out at the recent Association of Secondary Teachers in Ireland (ASTI) conference, elsewhere
the marks allocated for essays or projects undertaken outside the supervised examination hall are either reduced or disregarded in final results. Written examinations, supervised in examination halls, have reappeared as the assessment of choice in many jurisdictions and institutions.
Two respected international assessment-experts back this up. Daisy Christodoulou, author of Making Good Progress? the future of Assessment for Learning, writes that
the growing and undetectable use of generative AI poses a huge threat to the integrity of assessments, and by extension to the integrity of education.
The columnist Duncan Robinson has a theory that lots of big political scandals are not exposed but merely noticed. They hide in plain sight before they become public scandals. I think the extent of AI plagiarism is one of these scandals-in-waiting. Everyone in this world knows it’s a big problem – it just hasn’t filtered through to the general public yet.
Most punchily, Daniel Muijs, professor of education at Queen’s University Belfast, says about the proposals in the Republic:
Increasing the importance of coursework in high-stakes assessment just as the AI revolution hits must be one of the worst decisions in education.
That taskforce should be able to complete its work in a day or two. – Yours, etc,
