A good mixture of questions that gradually increased the challenge of the paper, say teachers
Students were pleased to find there were “no gremlins” to trip them up in Monday’s Leaving Cert higher level maths paper two, according to teachers.
There was a similar reaction from Stephen Begley, head of maths at Dundalk Grammar School and a subject expert with Studyclix, though he said section B of the paper was more challenging. Begley said students would have been comfortable working through the short questions, while long questions required some careful reading and thinking.
“The challenge was on the mechanical execution, not the comprehension. For example question 4 was a pure examination of curricular material rather than a test of its application,” Scully said. “As such there were no additional gremlins thrown into this paper to upset the students or take this paper away from their expectations formed over their years of study,” Scully said.Scully said the “ambiguous appearance of the sine rule and a novel question 9 might have worried some.”
“Question 7 on statistics and probability would have delighted many being similar in style to previous years. Question 8 put students through their paces for volume and geometry with a hint of calculus at the end, parts of which students may have found tricky. Questions were well prompted and if a student didn’t get one part it didn’t mean they were not able to tackle or complete subsequent parts,” he said.
Overall, he said the consensus was that section A was “quite nice”, while Section B was more challenging. “It was about a company making windscreen wipers, a little bit at the end on traffic lights, which is probability and statistics, and given there was such an emphasis on trigonometry and geometry, it was a little sting thrown in at the end,” he said.The ordinary level maths paper, meanwhile, was “accessible” with no surprises, according to teachers.
“They were textbook questions. There was nothing that was in a format that was problematic for the students and there was no context that would have thrown the students.” “Despite the breadth of the material, the questions were snappy and neatly itemised so students could deal with each bit individually,” she said.
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