Ireland's State Examinations Commission Funds AI-Assisted Marking Research and Tightens Leaving Cert AI-Integrity Rules

Ireland's Leaving Certificate, the country's national school-leaving and university-entry examination, has been raising the weighting of continuous coursework (to 40% of some subjects from September 2026), heightening concern that generative AI could be used undetectably in take-home assessments. In response, the State Examinations Commission (SEC), the statutory body that runs the Leaving Cert, issued a public procurement tender worth €100,000 for a one-year research project.
The tender asked researchers to examine, with a human examiner always kept in the loop, how generative AI could support the drafting of exam questions and marking schemes, assist markers, provide personalised formative feedback, and — critically — how reliably unauthorised AI use in student coursework can be detected. The commission publicly framed the work as exploratory research, not a decision to deploy AI marking.
In parallel, the SEC published binding guidance for the 2026 examinations: AI-generated material submitted as a student's own work without attribution is treated as plagiarism and can result in the forfeiture of all marks for that coursework component. As of this record, no AI-assisted marking system has been piloted or deployed by the SEC — the practice consists of a funded research commitment plus an enforced integrity policy, and its ultimate marking-technology outcome remains open.

Read the full analysis: https://www.thejournal.ie/leaving-cert-corrected-by-ai-6671133-Apr2025/