Barry Hayes is a lecturer in UCC's School of Engineering and decided to ask ChatGPT and DeepSeek to attempt the Electrical Power Engineering summer 2024 exam paper. “The results astonished me”, says Barry. “GPT-4o mini did not just pass the exam, it scored 90%, while DeepSeek-R1 scored even better with 94%. Both produced the answers to each exam question in seconds, without seeing any of the lectures or tutorial materials that my undergraduate students received. The average performance across the 61 UCC students that sat this exam in May 2024 was 63.8%.” The implications of the growth, sophistication and knowledge of GenAI tools on teaching and exams in universities are huge. “ChatGPT, DeepSeek and others can make convincing attempts at a whole range of assessments, be it writing text for a project report or essay, coding, or solving mathematical problems" https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2025/0217/1497164-university-exams-students-chatgpt-deepseek-generative-ai/