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Into the Third Week…

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags IFUT, Maynooth University, Nobel Prize for Physics 2026, Space Week, World Teachers' Day on October 4, 2026 by telescoper

The first two weeks of Semester 1 have been extremely busy. I always find it hard to adjust to teaching after the summer break even when I’m teaching familiar material, but this year we had quite a lot of timetabling issues which required swapping and juggling classes. I think it has now settled down, though, and at least I’m not behind on covering the material in lectures.

Next week will be busy for different reasons. For a start, tomorrow sees the first day of industrial action by the Irish Federation of University Teachers (IFUT). This is relatively gentle introduction, being in the form of a one-hour walk-out from 12-1 to mark World Teachers’ Day. I actually don’t have any teaching then so it won’t be very disruptive for me, but I will be attending the demonstration that will take place during the action. I hope it doesn’t rain. I have a lecture at 2pm and a telecon at 4pm both of which will go ahead as planned.

The strikes proper start with 24-hour stoppages on Wednesday 14th October and Wednesday 21st October, on which days we expect other campus trade unions, SIPTU and UNITE to strike. I expect most staff – especially those who have a long commute to and from work – will stay at home on those days, but since I live in Maynooth I am planning to a short walk to campus stand on the picket lines on both days.

Tuesday sees the announcement of the 2026 Nobel Prize for Physics. I really have no idea who will win it this year, but perhaps there’s still an outside chance for Michael Berry and Yakir Aharonov for their work on the geometric phase, although if they were going to win they probably would have done so by now.

Wednesday will be a normal teaching day, as will Thursday but it will be followed by our Space Week event, at which I will be speaking:

I think some tickets are still available, so if you’re in Maynooth feel free to register.

And then on Friday, after teaching is done, I’ll be heading off to the NCH again.

Autumnal Equinox 2026

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags Autumnal Equinox on September 22, 2026 by telescoper

Today is a very busy teaching day, so I just have time to post a quick note to say that the Autumnal Equinox (in the Northern Hemisphere) takes place in the early hours of tomorrow morning, Wednesday 23rd September 2026, at 01:05 Irish Time (00:05 UTC). I don’t intend to be awake then, so I’m posting this now. Of course the Equinox will be later today rather than tomorrow for some of you, depending on your time zone. Of course for those of you in the Southern Hemisphere it will be the Spring (or Vernal) Equinox.

Although the term `equinox’ refers to a situation in which day and night are of equal length, which implies that it’s a day rather than a specific time, the astronomical equinox is more accurately defined by a specific event, i.e. when the plane defined by Earth’s equator passes through the centre of the Sun’s disk (or, if you prefer, when the centre of the Sun passes through the plane defined by Earth’s equator). Day and night are not necessarily exactly equal on the equinox, but they’re the closest they get. From now on days in the Northern hemisphere will be shorter than nights and they’ll get shorter still until the Winter Solstice on Monday 21st December 2026 at 11.50 pm Irish Time.

Many people take the autumnal equinox to be the end of summer. There is a saying in some quarters, however, that `Summer is Summer to Michaelmas Day’ (September 29th), which is not until next week. The weather has indeed been very nice in Maynooth for the first couple of days of term. The temperature reached 23°C yesterday!

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A New Academic Year Begins…

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Biographical, Education, mathematics, Maynooth with tags Department of Physics, Differential Equations and Complex Analysis, Differential Equations and Transform Methods, GenAI, generative AI, mathematics, Maynooth University on September 21, 2026 by telescoper

It’s been a lovely summery day in Maynooth so far, despite the summer having definitely ended and therefore having to return to teaching at the start of my penultimate academic year as a university teacher. The campus was very full this morning, and I was stopped many times on my walk into the office by new students trying to find their lecture theatres. A common (understandable) mistake for the uninitiated of Maynooth is to think that the Science Lecture Theatre is actually in the Science Building. To add to the excitement there was a fire alarm in Pugin Hall, where I sometimes go for lunch, so the building was evacuated. The kitchen staff and others were taking the opportunity to bask in the sunshine before the alarm ended. I think it was a false alarm. In any case lunch was available as soon as they opened up again, and no harm was done.

It’s hard to believe that it is two full years since I returned from sabbatical, but at least I’m teaching the same modules this semester as I did when I returned in the Autumn of 2024. I still have to get everything sorted out, though, including setting up my Moodle pages and preparing the materials, which is what I’ve been doing today, as well as giving my first lecture of the year, for MP469 Differential Equations and Complex Analysis, this afternoon at 2pm; my second, also MP469, will be at 11am on Tuesday (tomorrow).

The timetable for my Engineering Mathematics (EE206 Differential Equations and Transform Methods) module has not changed, so my first lectures on that (a double session) are not until tomorrow. That means I have three hours of teaching tomorrow and every Tuesday throughout the semester, which will make Tuesday my most tiring day.

Both the modules I am teaching this term are mathematical in nature. As last year, I am concerned about the integrity of the coursework element of these modules in the light of improvements in Generative AI. Only a couple of years ago GenAI could not solve the sort of problems I set for homework, but now it generally can – especially for EE206. I don’t altogether object to people applying artificial intelligence to solve mathematical problems, but the issue is that it does make mistakes. Moreover, instead of saying “sorry I can’t solve that problem” it will generally present a superficially plausible but incorrect solution. Although students will probably use GenAI for problem-solving, I think it is important that they learn to do such problems themselves, otherwise they won’t know whether the solution coughed up by the algorithm is correct or not. That way lies disaster.

The only way to learn mathematics is by doing it. If students get GenAI to do the mathematics for them, then they won’t learn it. In the past we have given marks for coursework (usually 20% of the module mark) mainly to encourage students to do them. Students who don’t bother to do these exercises generally do badly in the final exam (80%).

For these reasons I moved the assessment from weekly homework sheets – which could be tackled with AI – to supervised in-class tests for which students can use notes on paper, but not laptops or phones, just like they would in the final examination. I will of course give examples for the students to have a go at themselves, and I will give feedback on their attempts, but they will not contribute to the module score. Another advantage of this approach is that students won’t have to do so much work against deadlines outside of class. Some students will probably use AI to solve these non-contributory assignments, which is fine by me. It’s like having an extra tutorial. To learn they must actually try the problems, rather than absorb the methods by just watching CoPilot solve them.

I followed this approach last year and it worked quite well so I’m keeping the same basic idea, although with some tweaks. As I described here, this means I have taken a much harder line on assignments than other lecturers and indeed other departments. I allow no assignment to contribute to a module grade unless it is supervised in such a way as to prevent “AI” being used. I believe that this is the only way to maintain the integrity of these assessments and that to do anything else will result in a lowering of academic standards. I believe there should be university-wide regulations to manage it, but there are none…

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A Time of Conferring

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags Conferring Ceremony, graduation ceremony, Maynooth University, Physics on September 7, 2026 by telescoper

I was feeling a bit grotty this morning and had lost my voice but I managed to summon up the energy to attend today’s Conferring Ceremonies – usually known as Graduation ceremonies in the UK – at Maynooth University. It was a special day for the graduands, their families and friends, of course, but also quite a significant one for me. The cohort of students graduating today included a significant number whom I taught in the first year at Maynooth, four years ago, before I went on sabbatical. I taught some of them again in their third year, after I returned, and some last year. I am no longer teaching first-year students, so this will be the last group that I’ll see from beginning to end of their degrees. It was nice to be at their Conferrings to see them off, and especially nice to chat afterwards and see that so many of them are going to do further study as postgraduates (some here in Maynooth and some elsewhere, including Trinity and UCD). I noticed this morning that the next intake of students has started to register. I don’t yet know how many Physics students I’ll be teaching in two weeks’ time but I do know that I’ll have retired before any of them graduate.

Conferring Ceremonies at Maynooth used to be held in the Aula Maxima, on South Campus, which is an excellent venue with lots of atmosphere. Nowadays however they are held in the far less evocative surroundings of a modern lecture theatre in the TSI Building. I know I’m an old fuddy-duddy but much preferred the previous location. Students don’t even get to sit in the same room as the parents, but march in through one door, cross the front of the hall, collect their parchment, and then march out through another door.

I like graduation ceremonies, actually. As the graduands go across the stage you realize that every one of them has a unique story to tell and a whole universe of possibilities in front of them. How their lives will unfold no-one can tell, but it’s a privilege to be there for one important milestone on their journey. It’s also a bit strange in some cases finally to put a name to a face that I’ve seen around the place regularly, just before they leave the University for good. I always find this a bittersweet occasion. There’s joy and celebration, of course, but tempered by the realization that many of the young people who you’ve seen around long enough to grow accustomed to their faces, will disappear into the big wide world never to be seen again. On the other hand, this year quite a few graduates of the Department of Theoretical Physics are staying in Maynooth to do Masters programmes so they won’t all be vanishing without trace.

Graduation of course isn’t just about dressing up. Nor is it only about recognizing academic achievement. It’s also a rite of passage on the way to adulthood and independence, so the presence of the parents at the ceremony adds another emotional dimension to the goings-on. Although everyone is rightly proud of the achievement – either their own in the case of the graduands or that of others in the case of the guests – there’s also a bit of sadness to go with the goodbyes. It always seems that as a lecturer you are only just getting to know students by the time they graduate, but that’s enough to miss them when they go. All this is a roundabout way of saying congratulations once more to everyone who graduated today, and I wish you all the very best for the future!

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On the Uncritical Adoption of “AI” in Academia

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Education, mathematics, Maynooth with tags AI, Artificial Intelligence, GenAI, Machine Learning on September 6, 2026 by telescoper

With thoughts turning to the new academic year I noticed an Open Letter to Universities in the Netherlands, which I have signed. You can read the letter yourself but here is a summary of the main calls to action:

• Resist the introduction of AI in our own software systems, from Microsoft to OpenAI to Apple. It is not in our interests to let our processes be corrupted and give away our data to be used to train models that are not only useless to us, but also harmful.

• Ban AI use in the classroom for student assignments, in the same way we ban essay mills and other forms of plagiarism. Students must be protected from de-skilling and allowed space and time to perform their assignments themselves.

• Cease normalising the AI hype and the lies which are prevalent in the technology industry’s framing of these technologies. The technologies do not have the advertised capacities and their adoption puts students and academics at risk of violating ethical, legal, scholarly, and scientific standards of reliability, sustainability, and safety.

• Fortify our academic freedom as university staff to enforce these principles and standards in our classrooms and our research as well as on the computer systems we are obliged to use as part of our work. We as academics have the right to our own spaces.

• Sustain critical thinking on AI and promote critical engagement with technology on a firm academic footing. Scholarly discussion must be free from the conflicts of interest caused by industry funding, and reasoned resistance must always be an option.

I agree with all of these. I don’t think The Management does though.

In Maynooth University there has been a total absence of leadership from the Management about the academic threats posed by the uncritical adoption of “AI” . I’ve put “AI” in quotes because most of what is being described as AI nowadays (e.g. LLMs) is not is in no way Artifical Intelligence. There is a place for such things as Machine Learning. Indeed, much of the data-driven research in my own field of cosmology would be impossible without them. The key, however, is not whether you insist on calling it AI or not, but the word uncritical. Much of what I have heard from our “Leadership” is simple-minded boosterism. And yes, that word is in quotes for the same reason as “AI”.

In planning my teaching for next term, which starts in two weeks, I have taken a hard line on assignments. I allow no assignment to contribute to a module grade unless it is supervised in such a way as to prevent “AI” being used. Both modules I will be teaching next semester are mathematical in nature, and the summative assessments will consist of four (unseen) in-class tests and a written exam. Phones, laptops and tablets are banned from all these.

I believe that this is the only way to maintain the integrity of these assessments and that to do anything else will result in a lowering of academic standards. I believe this is the case across a great many disciplines, so there should be university-wide regulations to manage it. I find the absence of any “Leadership” on this scandalous (but I’m afraid not surprising).

This is not to say that I will band the use of LLMs etc entirely. Students will be free to use ChatGPT or CoPilot or whatever to check their answers to the formative assessments I hand out, if they think that will help, but these will not contribute to their module mark.

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Back to School….

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth on August 31, 2026 by telescoper

Today has been a Bank Holiday in England and Wales but not here in Ireland; we had our August Bank Holiday at the start of the month of August. In fact this week sees school students of various ages returning to the classroom. That reminded me of this, from a while back:

I had three hours of telecons this afternoon which I decided to do at home, so I left work a little earlier than usual. On my way home I passed a group of boys who were obviously going home after their first day back at school. Their uniforms look very new and in pristine condition. I bet that won’t last!

Three weeks from today, on September 21st, we resume lectures at Maynooth University. We don’t yet know how many students will be taking our various modules but I checked just now and noticed that one or two postgraduate and exchange students have already started enrolling…

Another Day of Offerings

Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags CAO, CAO offers, Leaving Certificate, Maynooth University, MH101, MH201, MH204, MH206 on August 26, 2026 by telescoper

Today (26th August 2026) was the day that students across Ireland received offers of places at Third-Level Institutions to start next month. The offers for all courses and all institutions are available on the official CAO website here; they are also widely available elsewhere.

The official numbers for first round offers at Maynooth are here. Minimum points required for Maynooth’s – and indeed Ireland’s – most important course, MH206 Theoretical Physics and Mathematics, are 500 this year, down from 520 last year. MH204 Physics with Astrophysics is 401, up on last year’s 385. MH201 General Science (of which Physics is a part) is on 346 points, down 6 from 352 last year. Maynooth’s biggest course (by student numbers) – and indeed the biggest course in Ireland reckoned that way – is the Omnibus Arts programme MH101 which has an entry level this year of just 300 CAO points, the same as last year. There are several more rounds of offers and the final points may vary as the system works through to the finish.

It seems the first-round entry points for most courses at Maynooth have not changed dramatically despite the reduction in Leaving Certificate grades this year after several years of artificial inflation over the Covid-19 years. Across the country it seems about half the courses have increased their CAO first-round offers. No upward trend is discernible at Maynooth.

Leaving Certificate results are just one factor in determining the CAO points for a particular course at a particular Institution. Overall the picture is rather complex. Across Ireland, points are up for about 50% of courses and down for about 42%. The CAO points needed for a course are largely a matter of demand versus capacity rather than academic performance. For the last few years Maynooth University has been recruiting more and more students, putting pressure on accommodation, teaching loads and campus space. This strategy will prevent any significant rise in CAO points for the foreseeable future. This is probably happening to some extent across the sector, though Maynooth has a more urgent need for more students: to pay for the legions of new posts it has created within its bloated management structure.

A reminder that all this just concerns the first round of offers so things may change significantly over the next week or two. Students now have to decide whether to accept their first-round offer or try to change course. They have until next week to do this. Departments won’t know how many new students they have for a while yet.

Update: 27/8/206. Here is the traditional Irish Times supplement with all first-round offers, confirming most courses at Maynooth are bucking the national trend by going down rather than up:

Reflections on the 2026 Leaving Certificate Results

Posted in Covid-19, Education, Maynooth with tags Applied Mathematics, ireland, Leaving Certificate, Leaving Certificate 2026, mathematics, Physics on August 21, 2026 by telescoper

Yesterday I attended my last two Examination Boards for the year at Maynooth University. one for graduating MSc students and another for undergraduate repeat students in Engineering (which I attend because I’m teaching a mathematics course they do). That, more or less, is the end of the business (for me) for the 2025/6 academic year. No sooner is that done, however, than preparations for the start of the 2026/7 teaching session begins, as we wait to find out how many new students we will be admitting to our courses in September.

Today’s the day that over 70,000 school students across Ireland received their Leaving Certificate Results. As always there will be joy for some, and disappointment for others. The headline news relating to these results is that the proportion of students receiving the top grades in higher level examinations (i.e. H1) is down significantly from 11.7% last year to 10.1% this year. This fall is because various adjustments that were made during the Covid-19 pandemic are gradually being wound down. After next year they will disappear altogether.

I thought I would have a quick look at the results for subjects relevant to Physics:

Subject	Number (2025)	Number (2026)	% Grade 1 (2025)	% Grade 1 (2026)
Maths A	23540	25157	11.4	8.1
Maths G	33364	35444	6.1	4.2
Physics A	6592	6855	19.5	15.6
Physics G	1154	1335	5.5	4.5
Applied Maths A	1861	1954	25.9	20.9
Applied Maths G	34	50	5.9	4

(A is higher level and G is ordinary level). Please note that this year’s numbers are provisional and may change as a result of appeals, etc. The full details can be found here.

You can see that the number of students taking these subjects has increased since last year, but in all cases the percentage getting top grades has fallen. Note the very low numbers in the last row, meaning that most students who take Applied Mathematics do the Higher level version. The numbers mean that exactly 2 people got the top grade in 2026 and 2025!

Comparison with earlier years is interesting. Here are the H1 percentages for Mathematics, Physics and Applied Mathematics since 2019:

	Mathematics	Physics	Applied Mathematics
2019	6.4	10.9	16.5
2020	8.6	16.1	29.9
2021	15.1	21.1	40.9
2022	18.1	23.7	29.3
2023	11.2	21.2	31.0
2024	12.6	20.7	28.4
2025	11.4	19.5	25.9
2026	8.1	15.6	20.9

You can see that although these percentages have declined from their respective peaks they remain well above 2019 pre-pandemic levels.

It is also worth noting that the number of students taking Physics (A) nationally seems to be recovering from a sharp drop in 2022-4, the numbers being: 6583(2019); 7037(2020); 7210(2021); 6487(2022); 6143(2023); 6009 (2024); 6592 (2025); and 6855 (2026).

Anyway, now that the results are out there will be a busy time until next Wednesday (26th August) when the CAO first round offers go out. That is when those students wanting to go to university find out if they made the grades and university departments find out how many new students (if any) they will have to teach in September. Incidentally, colleagues in the UK might be interested to know that, here in Maynooth, departments have no say in admissions decisions: these are all made centrally.

P.S. When I was a little kid we used to call a “Certificate” a “Stiff Ticket”. I just thought you would like to know that.

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R.I.P. Jason Arday (1985-2026)

Posted in Biographical, Education, Literature, R.I.P. with tags DEI, Diversity, EDI, Equity, Inclusion, Jason Arday, Plagiarism on August 16, 2026 by telescoper

I read the terrible news about the death of Jason Arday on Friday evening. The first thing I want to do is express heartfelt condolences to his family – especially his wife and two children – and his friends and former colleagues and my hope that the media who hounded Prof. Arday to his death will at least give them some space to mourn his loss.

The word “tragedy” is often misused, applied to any event that is sad which this certainly is. The case of Jason Arday is a true tragedy in the sense arising from Greek drama: the central protagonists are always flawed characters who makes bad decisions, but are propelled relentlessly towards their fate by forces entirely beyond their control. Once the right-wing media lynch mob got hold of this story they were never going to back off. This is just some of the coverage from one newspaper, The Daily Telegraph.

Yes, Arday did bad things, but the media attention was utterly disproportionate. Nobody could be expected to withstand such treatment. How did the people churning out these articles think this would end?

I find this whole saga bleaker than anything Sophocles wrote, because nobody comes out of it with any credit at all. Not Arday himself, nor Cambridge University, nor the press, nor Nathan Cofnas, the white supremacist blogger who brought everything out into the open. The latter may have exposed academic misconduct, but his motivation was rooted in his racist views and undoubtedly malicious.

Of course academic misconduct is wrong, but it does not warrant a death sentence. And where was the media furore when a (white) History professor at Cambridge, William O’Reilly, was found to have plagiarised his own students essays? Professor O’Reilly, incidentally, remains in post. That’s just one example. I’m sure there are dozens more that we know nothing about, because they couldn’t be used to further racist ends. If standards are not applied equally then they can be used to reinforce prejudice, as they have in this case. It’s called hypocrisy.

The usual Culture Warmongers are using this case to further their agenda against the principles of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion which are supposed to be adopted in universities and other institutions. For myself, this tragedy demonstrates that EDI* principles are not satisfied by mere tokenism, a facile form of window-dressing that does nothing to change the culture within the organisation.

(*For any Americans reading this I use the UK/European EDI in preference to the DEI used in the States which reminds me too much of OPUS DEI.)

In a slightly different context, this is why I have become cynical about the “widening participation” efforts by many higher-education institutions to recruit students from disadvantaged backgrounds. These may succeed in bringing more such students into courses – and hence greater income to the university – but they are rarely backed up by the support needed to enable them to succeed. Many institutions do not even track the outcomes of these students, not because they can’t but because The Management doesn’t care: once they’re in through the door that’s “job done”.

I came from what some people would call a disadvantaged background, although I don’t think of it that way. That I have had a career in academia is a result of an enormous amount of luck, starting way back in primary school. I would dearly like to see a system in which luck wasn’t so important, but what is being done now is not the way to achieve that. If we’re going to do EDI – and we should – let’s do it properly.

UPDATE: 20/8/2026. Nathan Cofnas has been suspended by Gent University pending a disciplinary process.

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Autumn Repeats Again

Posted in Education, History, Maynooth with tags Autumn, Institute of Physics, Maynooth University, Repeat examinations on August 6, 2026 by telescoper

The repeat examination period at Maynooth University has begun. In fact the first papers were sat yesterday (5th August); the period goes on for ten days or so, I will have four different papers to grade, though I’m expecting only one candidate each for three of them. My first is tomorrow (Friday 7th August).

A couple of years ago, Maynooth University produced this nice good luck message for those resitting so I’ll repeat it here:

Every year at this time I mention the difference between the system of repeats in Maynooth compared to other institutions with which I am familiar, especially in the UK. Elsewhere, students generally take resits when, because they have failed one or more examinations the previous May, they have not accumulated sufficient credits to proceed to the next year of their course. Passing the resit allows them to retrieve lost credit, but their mark is generally capped at a bare pass (usually 40%). That means the student gets the credit they need for their degree but their average (which determines whether they get 1st, 2nd or 3rd class Honours) is affected. This is the case unless a student has extenuating circumstances affecting the earlier examination, such as bad health or family emergency, in which case they take the resit as a `sit’, i.e. for the first time with an uncapped mark.

Here in Maynooth, however, the mark obtained in a repeat examination is usually not capped. Indeed, some students – though not many – elect to take the repeat examination even if they passed earlier in the summer, in order to increase their average mark.

Some people don’t like the idea of uncapped repeats because they feel that it would lead to many students playing games, i.e. deliberately not taking exams in May with the intention of spreading some of their examination load into August. For this reason the Institute of Physics has decided to impose capped resits as part of its accreditation requirements. Some people here seem to think IOP accreditation is worth having so we’re being pushed into that requirement. I find it heavy-handed and unhelpful. I also think it imposes a dreary uniformity on physics courses in the UK. In any case, IOP accreditation is unimportant unless you want to do postgraduate study in physics in the UK (and often not even then). It doesn’t matter at all anywhere else.

If you think students have an unfair advantage if they don’t take a full diet of examinations in May, then the logical conclusion is that part-time students have an unfair advantage as do students taking micro-credentials consisting of just one or two modules. It’s the essence of the modular system that each module result should be considered on its own merit, not in relation to other modules a student may or may not have taken at the same time. One can of course argue whether the modular system is good or not, but if you have it then you should act consistently in accordance with it. You wouldn’t penalize students who have to work to support their study relative to those who don’t, would you?

And there’s no real evidence of students in Maynooth actually playing the system in the way the IOP thinks they do anyway. For one thing, the results from the repeat examination period are not confirmed until early September so that students that deploy this strategy do not know whether they are going to be able to resume their course until just a couple of weeks before term. That could cause lots of problems securing accommodation, etc, so it doesn’t seem to me to be a good ploy. Finalists adopting this strategy will not be able to graduate with the rest of their cohort and may miss several months of potential employment. I think most of our students are smart enough to realize that it’s a risky strategy.

Anyway, I’d welcome comments for or against whether resits/repeats should be capped/uncapped and on what practice is adopted in your institution.

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In the Dark