Academic Services in Ireland

ECTS Credits

Irish modules are weighted in ECTS credits under the European system — a full academic year is 60 ECTS, and awards are built by accumulating them.

NFQ Level

The National Framework of Qualifications places every Irish award on a level from 1 to 10, so a qualification’s standard is clear and comparable.

Continuous Assessment (CA)

CA is coursework marked across the semester — essays, projects and quizzes — often combined with a final exam for your module grade.

Dissertation vs Thesis

In Ireland a dissertation is usually the research project for an honours or Master’s degree, while a thesis is the larger original research for a PhD.

QQI

Quality and Qualifications Ireland is the state body that maintains standards and accredits many Irish awards and providers.

Marking Scheme & Rubric

The criteria your examiner uses to award marks. Writing to the marking scheme is the fastest route to a higher classification.

Similarity report

The percentage of your text that matches sources already in Turnitin’s databases: the web, published journals and previously submitted student papers. It is deterministic text matching, so it gives the same answer twice. Turnitin’s own position is that it does not check for plagiarism, it identifies matching text. High scores routinely come from correctly quoted and cited passages, your reference list, the assignment question itself and standard methods sections.

AI writing indicator

The percentage of qualifying prose a model predicts could have been generated or paraphrased by AI. It is a probabilistic estimate, not a measurement. Turnitin states it should not be the sole basis for action against a student, and suppresses scores between 1 and 19 per cent because false positives are more common there. Plain, well-structured academic prose and writing by people whose first language is not English are the classic false positives.

The widest contract cheating law anywhere

Section 43A of the Qualifications and Quality Assurance (Amendment) Act 2019 criminalises providing a cheating service, advertising one, and separately publishing the advertisement, which reaches platforms and media in a way the Australian and English statutes do not. QQI holds the prosecution power and states penalties of up to 100,000 euro and five years. The learner who uses the service does not commit an offence.

Two national documents govern AI

NAIN’s Generative Artificial Intelligence: Guidelines for Educators, published September 2023, and the Higher Education Authority’s Generative AI in Higher Education Teaching and Learning: Policy Framework, version 1.0, December 2025. The HEA framework sets five principles, requires each institution to hold a single coherent AI policy with discipline-sensitive exemplars, makes AI literacy part of the curriculum, and rejects both blanket prohibition and uncritical adoption.

Ireland is the most sceptical about detection

NAIN states that none of the available tools is fully capable of detecting GenAI, and names Turnitin over false positives and data protection. The HEA adds that detectors are not determinative evidence and recommends an oral assessment safeguard so staff can verify authorship directly. The University of Limerick publicly discourages reliance on detection tools; the University of Galway relies on subject experts plus a one-to-one conversation.

No institutional default, by module

Trinity College Dublin permits generative AI unless otherwise stated in the course or module handbook. UCD has no general institutional policy: permissions vary by college, school, programme and module, and its College of Arts and Humanities runs a red, amber and green traffic light system where red means no use for any purpose. The University of Limerick puts the decision squarely with the module leader.

You may have to declare that you did not use it

This is Ireland’s distinctive requirement. The University of Limerick issues an acknowledgement template that includes a declaration that AI was not used in any aspect of the assignment. The HEA goes further and ties the declaration duty to whether the tool sits on the institution’s approved register, so using a private system triggers a declaration where an approved one would not.

NFQ, ECTS and two incompatible grading systems

Level 6 Higher Certificate, Level 7 Ordinary Bachelor, Level 8 Honours Bachelor, Level 9 Master’s, Level 10 Doctoral, with 60 ECTS to a full-time year. But Ireland runs two grading systems side by side: Trinity and most institutions use percentages, where a 2.1 means 60 to 69 per cent, while UCD returns letter grades on a 4.2 GPA where a 2.1 means an award GPA of 3.08 to 3.67. A single Irish percentage table is not universal.

The scale of the problem is now public

Freedom of information reporting in January and February 2026 found more than 500 students across Irish higher education were found to have used AI improperly in the 2024/25 year, including 224 unauthorised AI cases at the University of Galway and 71 at TU Dublin. Several institutions, including Trinity, UCD and Maynooth, do not keep centralised records at all.

We start from your rules, not ours

Before anything is written we take your module descriptor, your rubric, your referencing style and your institution’s integrity and AI position. If your assessment sits in a no-AI band, that constrains the whole engagement.

Source first research

Every claim is traced to a real, checkable source that we have actually read. No invented citations, no fabricated data, no references to papers that do not exist. This is a hard rule and it is not negotiable.

Written from scratch, every time

Nothing is recycled from a previous student’s work and we keep no library of pre-written essays to resell. Work delivered to you is never delivered to anyone else, which is what keeps it out of the student paper database that flags the next person.

Referencing built and checked entry by entry

Citations and the reference list are built in Harvard, APA 7, OSCOLA Ireland, Vancouver, IEEE or whatever your module requires, then checked back against each source individually. This is where most easy marks are lost and the cheapest place to gain them.

Similarity checked before it reaches you

A similarity report is run before delivery and the matched text is reviewed line by line, not glanced at as a number. Quoted and cited matches stay. Uncited overlap is rewritten or properly attributed.

Explained, not just handed over

You receive the report with the work, plus a short walk-through of the argument and the sources, so you can defend the piece in a tutorial, a viva or an integrity meeting. If you cannot explain it, it has not been delivered properly.

What we do

✓Tutoring, structural feedback and worked explanation of difficult material

✓Model answers and exemplars that show how a top band is actually reached

✓Research support, literature searching and source evaluation

✓Editing and proofreading of work you have written

✓Referencing correction and reference list construction in Harvard, APA 7, OSCOLA Ireland, Vancouver, IEEE or whatever your module requires

✓Statistical analysis with the method explained so you can defend it

✓Thesis and dissertation coaching chapter by chapter, at your pace

✓A similarity report and a plain-English explanation of what it shows

What we will not do

✕Sit an invigilated exam, online test or proctored assessment for you

✕Log in to your university account or learning management system

✕Submit work to your institution on your behalf

✕Resell work already delivered to another student

✕Invent citations, sources, participants or data

✕Help you falsify a declaration about AI use, or write your prompt log for you

✕Claim we can guarantee a specific grade or a specific similarity percentage

✕Tell you that a detector score is something we can control