Using AI to maximise grades, rather than understanding, left Irish graduate Senan Tubridy questioning the value of his degree. In the Irish Examiner, he argues universities should respond with better assessment, including oral exams that test whether students understand their work.
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
Tubridy describes using ChatGPT for answers and explanations during his degree, while students around him focused on getting marks. He says his university cut almost all assignment work and replaced it with in-class tests and end-of-semester exams, a response he felt narrowed learning towards memorising material for repeatable questions.
His alternative is to pair a piece of work, such as a problem sheet, project or research, with an oral examination. A tutor could question students about the work and probe where their understanding holds or fails. Tubridy acknowledges concerns about student anxiety, fair assessment and the time such conversations would take, but argues that a prepared, in-depth discussion could be better than a constant cycle of right-or-wrong tests.
Why it matters
The argument is not simply that students use AI to cheat. Tubridy says he used it to improve his own outcomes, and asks what an assessment system is measuring when students can produce correct work without engaging with the reasoning behind it. That is a more awkward question than another round of chatbot policing, and harder to answer with a new exam timetable.
His account is one graduate’s experience, not a survey of universities. But it gives the debate a practical focus: if take-home work is easier to outsource, assessment needs to show what students can explain and apply for themselves.
Our read
Telling students not to use AI is not much of a plan when the incentives still reward the finished answer over the learning behind it. Oral exams could help test understanding, but they take staff time and need fair, consistent design. The useful challenge in Tubridy’s essay is to ask whether universities are changing assessment to support learning, or mainly to make AI-assisted work harder to mark.
What to watch
- Whether universities test oral assessment alongside coursework, rather than relying on it as a blanket replacement.
- How they address staff capacity, consistency and student anxiety.
- Whether assessment changes measure understanding, not just students’ ability to reproduce answers under exam conditions.
Discussion spark: If AI makes take-home work easier to outsource, should universities move towards oral exams, or would that create a less fair and more resource-heavy system?
Sources and evidence
- Source update (14 November 2026, 00:43 UTC)
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