Additional Assessment Components: English and AI

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One of the features of proposed reform in the Irish Leaving Certificate is Additional Assessment Components, with AAC joining our suite of TLAs alongside CBA and SSE. It has already been determined that these components will be worth at least 40% of the final grade, whatever the subject.

Embarrassingly, this idea has coincided with the technical development which threatens to make it pointless in English. The arrival of ChatGPT in November 2022 has been followed by a blizzard of further Generative AI developments, and presumably there are many more to come. The reformed English course is due to start for Fifth Years in September 2026, and so those pupils will be taking their assessments, including their terminal exam, in 2028. So, still four more years of GenAI ‘progress’!

I have written separately in my Substack post English Teaching, AI and the Thermostatic Principle on how GenAI is a bad fit for English teaching, possibly indeed even damaging pupils’ intellectual development. That post collates material from the many interesting writers currently looking at educational implications, such as Marc Watkins, John Warner and Dan Meyer (all from the US). In this part of the world, I listened on Saturday at researchED Belfast to Daisy Christodoulou and Bradley Busch among others. Daisy explained clearly at the subsequent HMC conference how AI has rendered impossible any form of integrity in assessing work outside strict supervision. Bradley expanded on his Inner Drive blogpost ‘The Awkward AI Homework Question’, which showed how neither teachers nor technology can reliably spot AI use. Now think of how much higher-stakes a third-level qualification assessment is, compared to regular homework.

Currently there is radio silence on the serious problem AI poses to any form of unsupervised assessment. Back in April the Minister for Education seemed to recognise this in an announcement, but there has been nothing since:

There is also a significant body of work being done by the State Examinations Commission. I am confident and they are confident that they are protecting the integrity of the exams - and that is important.

In the September edition of the NAPD’s ‘Leader’ magazine Professor Áine Hyland addressed the issue across all subjects in her article ‘Assessment for Equity and Excellence?’ She stated that these AACs have caused a lot of concern among students, teachers, university representatives and the general public. She pointed out the inevitable disadvantages for equity (the Matthew effect):

A greater concern has to be the advantage that such a decision will inevitably confer on students from already advantaged backgrounds. Regardless of how carefully a student’s work outside the examination hall is monitored by their teachers, students who have support and resources and/or access to additional advice and teaching outside school will be at considerable advantage when preparing their investigative projects.

This long-understood concern has been supercharged by Generative AI, as shown in the article by Professor Hyland in the area of science. English is currently protected from such concerns, but perhaps for not much longer:

in view of these developments, there is a strong argument for postponing the introduction of the 40% AAC in the Leaving Cert, pending study of international experiences of the implications of Generative AI for assessment – or at least reducing the proportion to a more reasonable 20%. Given the high-stakes nature of the Leaving Cert and the fact that there will always be some parents who will do whatever it takes to secure a place on a high-points university programme for their offspring, it is unrealistic and unfair to ask teachers to verify that the submitted work is the unaided work of the student.

In the light of the above and in the interests of equity and fairness, it is to be hoped that this ill-advised reform will be reconsidered and that the proposal to allocate 40% of Leaving Cert marks to an additional assessment component be reconsidered.

So where are we now?

  • I have written elsewhere several times on the well-meaning but naive notion that AACs will reduce stress. It is more likely that they will increase it. Right now Irish already has 40% outside the exam (for the oral) - anyone who thinks those students experience just 60% of their stress in early June does not work in schools.

  • AACs are also likely to have a deleterious effect on extracurricular activities in schools such as sport, therefore damaging student well-being.

  • An AAC in a low-stakes environment would be an excellent idea, but everything that is assessed in the Leaving Certificate process is very high-stakes indeed. Every 40% AAC will be subject to this unalterable fact of the system.

  • Theoretically English pupils could do a controlled conditions test like an oral examination, which is then sent on for external assessment. But this will not happen: there is no capacity at all for the enormous amount of time, money and organisation that that would require.  The awkward fact about exams is that they are cheap and efficient in administrative terms.

So we await some proposal which guarantees the integrity of the AAC in English. The start of a reformed course is under two years away for English. Some will be fearful that a fudge will send us into uncharted waters and permanently damage our subject (or worse, in Conor Murphy’s words).

As I write this, there is a brouhaha about the provision in the 2024 budget of €9 million to fund pouches to lock away mobile phones during the school day. The Social Democrats TD Gary Gannon called it a scandalous waste of money. The Minister and some of her cabinet colleagues have defended it as a proper response to the many disadvantages of phones on school campuses.

But let’s hope that the government’s eagerness to protect schoolchildren from technology by locking away their phones is not accompanied by allowing another form of damaging technology into their school lives - into, indeed, the very core of our subject.