Colman Noctor

kind of getting around the kind of AI stuff, you know, that how do we ensure people are learning?

And I've gone back to doing table quizzes in classes, you know, to try and get people to, and it's, they're really good in terms of, you know, asking them a question, they have to confer and they go, oh, you covered that there.

So, but it's funny, like we're talking about the leaving cert and, you know, loads of people will say how archaic it is, you know, that you sit down and do a three hour exam or whatever.

And

The temptation with AI is you have to go back to pen and paper exams to prove that somebody is not using AI.

And the more crude the assessment instrument, the more robust it is in a world where AI can infiltrate all the assignments and things that people do.

So, yeah, again, an interesting time to be in academia, but certainly challenges ahead for sure.

I think while it might be the toughest exam you'll ever do, that doesn't correlate to being the most important exam you'll ever do.

And I think we probably conflate those two things.

And again, when we're trying to decide what we're going to do with the rest of our lives at 17, 18 years of age, it's preposterous that we would even suggest that we would have a clue about that.

Like what car you want to drive when you're 20 is different to the car you want to drive when you're 40.

Do you know what I mean?

And so I think the narrative around the Leaving Cert is like this is the big to be all and end all.

And that adds a pressure to young people who are doing it.

But in actual fact, the skills that you require to successfully negotiate working world and working life are much more about flexibility, adaptability than they are about being able to stick to a plan.

And while the Leaving Cert is certainly tough for lots of people, for some people who have a very linear memory based intelligence, it suits them very well.

It doesn't always translate that that will mean you'll be successful in the world of work or college or whatever it might be.

And you can get somebody who might come into third level and they're brilliant at remembering stats and they can write an essay perfectly, but their capacity to reflect or be abstract or to

demonstrate a degree of maybe alternative levels of compassion can be quite limited.

And so, as we say about the world of AI, those soft skills of flexibility, adaptability, social communication, those are almost the things that even the Elon Musk's and Sam Altman's of the world are saying that people will need going forward.