A mother stopped me after a talk in Kilkenny last spring and asked whether her daughter’s biology project was the thing she had read about in the paper, or something the school had invented. Fair question. Biology changed in September 2025, the first students to sit it go into the exam hall in June 2027, and most of what parents have heard arrived second hand.
So here is what the Biology in Practice Investigation actually is, what it is worth, who marks it, and where students lose marks on it.
What is the Biology in Practice Investigation?
It is the coursework component of the redeveloped Leaving Certificate Biology course. According to the NCCA specification for Biology, the Biology in Practice Investigation is worth forty per cent of the marks and the written examination carries the remaining sixty. Students taking Biology from September 2025 onwards do both, and the first cohort sits the written paper in June 2027.
The word investigation is doing real work in that title. This is not an essay about biology, and it is not a poster. Students plan and carry out practical work, record what happened, then account for it. The thinking that earns marks is mostly about why a result might not mean what it appears to mean. That is unfamiliar ground for a student who has spent five years being asked for the right answer.
Is forty per cent really decided before the exam?
Yes, and this is the part Irish parents find hardest to believe. Forty per cent of Biology is settled and submitted before the written paper is ever opened. Citizens Information, in guidance last updated on 14 September 2026, confirms the additional assessment components in the redeveloped Leaving Certificate are worth at least forty per cent of the marks in a subject.
I labour this in every school I visit. A student who treats the investigation as homework squeezed in around real study has given away a chunk of the subject.
The flip side is good news, and I say it to sixth years who are already panicking. Forty per cent of this subject is not decided on one morning in June. It is decided across weeks, with notes to hand and a chance to fix a weak section. That suits a great many students better than a three hour paper does.
Who marks it, the teacher or the State Examinations Commission?
The State Examinations Commission marks it. Citizens Information, updated on 14 September 2026, states plainly that the additional assessment components are marked externally by the State Examinations Commission and not by the student’s own class teacher. This is the detail most often got wrong in conversations I have with parents, and getting it wrong changes how families behave.
Teacher based assessment was in the original design and was dropped in September 2023, with the then Minister Norma Foley citing the rapid growth of generative artificial intelligence, as the Irish Examiner reported at the time. The consequence is worth understanding. Your child’s teacher is a coach here, not a judge, so there is nothing awkward about asking them for help. I have watched students hold back from asking questions because they thought they were being assessed in the room. They were not.
How much time should the investigation take?
The Irish Times reported in September 2025 that the projects are expected to take in the region of twenty hours, with briefs issuing to schools during sixth year and completion expected before a submission date the State Examinations Commission prescribes. Twenty hours sounds generous until you price it against a week in February when three subjects all want something.
Here is how I would spend it. Four hours reading the brief and working out what is actually being asked, which is where most of the damage is done or avoided. Eight to ten on the practical work, spread over more than one sitting so a bad afternoon does not become the whole dataset. The rest on writing, then rewriting after leaving it alone a few days. The students who come unstuck are rarely the ones who did too little practical work. They are the ones who wrote it up the night before.
Does the investigation replace the old practicals?
The redeveloped specification replaces the previous Biology syllabus, so the investigation is part of a new total and not an extra task bolted onto the old course. How the practical work in the new course compares with what came before is a question for your child’s teacher, who will have both. Parents of older siblings should be careful here, because a student who sat Biology two years ago sat a different subject.
That matters at home. Past papers from before 2027 are still useful for much of the written content, but the shape of the assessment has moved, and an older sibling’s advice may be quietly out of date.
What does the common brief mean in practice?
The brief is common, meaning it is not differentiated by level, and the State Examinations Commission issues it annually. So Higher and Ordinary Level students in the same room work from the same starting instruction, and the difference shows in what they do with it rather than in what they are handed.
I find this reassures Ordinary Level students and unsettles Higher Level ones, which is about the right way round. There is no easier version to fall back on and no ceiling either, so an Ordinary Level student who works carefully can do very well here.
One practical warning. Because the brief changes each year, anything a student finds online from a previous year is answering a different question. Copying its structure is a good way to write a competent response to something nobody asked.
Where do students actually lose marks?
Nobody has sat this component yet, so I am going on the coursework subjects I have worked with for years, the History research study and the Home Economics journal among them. In those, marks go missing in three places, and none of them is the subject knowledge. Students answer a question adjacent to the brief, record their work too thinly to be interrogated later, and write conclusions firmer than the evidence allows.
The third is worth dwelling on. A student who writes that their results prove something, when the results merely point that way, has made a claim a marker can knock down. A student who writes about what the result suggests, what might have confounded it, and what they would do differently is doing the thing the course actually assesses.
Hedging feels like weakness to a seventeen year old. In science it is competence, and it is marked as such.
How should a student revise Biology now that the project is submitted?
Once the investigation goes in, sixty per cent of the subject remains, examined in the familiar way. That is the moment to switch from project mode into retrieval mode, and it is a harder gear change than it sounds, because coursework habits do not suit exam preparation.
The evidence here is unusually clear. Roediger and Karpicke, writing in Psychological Science in 2006, found that a week after studying, students who had tested themselves recalled fifty six per cent of the material against forty two per cent for those who reread it. At five minutes the rereading group did better, which is why students trust a method that fails them in June. For Biology that means closing the book and writing a process out from memory.
Can a student use artificial intelligence on the investigation?
Only with acknowledgement, and it earns no marks by itself. As the Irish Examiner reported in November 2025, the State Examinations Commission’s consolidated coursework rules treat including material generated by artificial intelligence without quoting it as the work of that software as plagiarism, which can mean forfeiting all marks for the coursework component.
The Commission’s position, as reported, is that credit can only be awarded for the effective use of such material in support or development of the student’s own work. Using a tool to generate possible project themes at the brainstorming stage is given as a permitted example, provided the student references it.
My advice to students is blunter than the rules require. If you cannot explain a sentence in your own project out loud, take it out.
What Parents Ask Me First About the Biology Investigation
My child’s teacher says the project is not started yet. Should I be worried?
Probably not. Briefs issue to schools on the State Examinations Commission’s own schedule, and the autumn is usually about groundwork instead of the investigation itself. Ask the teacher what the school’s internal deadline is, and put it in the family diary once you have it.
Does the project mean less studying for the written exam?
No, it means the same studying compressed into a shorter run. Sixty per cent of Leaving Cert Biology is still a written paper, and it is sat by students who have just spent months on coursework. Planning the switch back to exam preparation matters more in this subject than it used to.
Can we get the project checked by a grinds teacher?
A grinds teacher can teach biology, but the work submitted has to be genuinely the student’s own, and schools must report coursework they cannot confirm is authentic. McCoy and Byrne, in ESRI research published in 2022, found grinds produce no Leaving Certificate performance advantage on average, with some benefit for lower achieving students only.
What happens if the practical work goes wrong?
That is not the disaster it feels like. A result that did not behave as expected, honestly recorded and thoughtfully discussed, is the sort of thinking a science marker is looking for. The risk lies in hiding a problem.
Is Biology now harder than it was?
It is differently distributed, and I would not call it simply harder. Forty per cent is earned over weeks with notes to hand, which suits some students better than an examination hall. The students who find it harder are usually those who leave the coursework late and lose both components at once.
What I Can Do to Help With Biology
This is one of the subjects where a student can be working hard and still be working on the wrong thing, and the investigation makes that more likely, not less, because the marks are not where students assume they are.
I am Enda O’Doherty, and I run Study Skills Ireland from my base in Waterford, working with secondary schools the length of the country. Schools book the student study skills seminar for entire year groups, and this is one of the things we work through together, not just talk about. Parents usually get more from the talk for parents, which is built around the questions that come up at kitchen tables, not the ones that come up in classrooms. For a student who needs the work built with them over weeks, not described once and left with them, private study coaching is the option that goes deepest. Use the contact page if you want to ask about any of it. I am happy to say when the answer is that you are already doing the right things.
