This years’ higher level maths was fair and gave students more choice, but it was not without challenges, teachers have said.
“More choice and more time meant that students would have been able to avoid their worst topics and give a fair account of themselves,” said Aidan Roantree, senior maths teacher at the Institute of Education. “Despite initially appearing off putting, students would eventually have found most parts of these questions accessible.”
Eamonn Toland, founder of TheMathsTutor.ie, said that it was an accessible paper for the well-prepared student, considering the amount of choice available.
“Any student with a good knowledge of algebra, functions and calculus would have had plenty of choice to tackle this paper,” Mr Toland said.
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Stephen Begley, Studyclix.ie subject expert and a maths teacher at Dundalk Grammar school, in Co Louth, said that it was a very fair, well guided & encouraging paper.
“The short questions were presented, for the most part, in a direct and concise manner, with none of them asking for anything intensely demanding.
“The long questions arrayed a decent choice for the students, with not too much context and waffle loaded in the typical text heavy questions. This section was presented in an encouraging manner using direct language and really guided the students in how to approach the questions,” Mr Begley said
Mr Roantree said that Section A, where students had to answer four questions out of six, contained “at least four nice questions” including question one on quadratics, question two on easy integration and question five on differentiation, solving a cubic equation and inequalities.
“Question 3 was on complex numbers and whereas mostly it was standard, students might have been slightly surprised by a slight overlap with co-ordinate geometry,” said Mr Roantree.
“Question 4 was one of the trickier questions in Section A. It was on sequences, specifically recursion formula, and on arithmetic sequences and series and contained parts on powers and logs.”
Mr Roantree said, however, that Section B of the paper was “a bit trickier” and that each question was quite long.
“Question seven was nominally on heart rates, and contained parts on algebra, rates of change and a novel form of connected rates of change. This was a tricky question.”
On the ordinary level paper, Jean Kelly, maths teacher at the Institute of Education, said it was nice but had a few tricky parts.
“There was a lot of algebra and graphs and, as with last year, there was very little calculus,” Ms Kelly said.
“There was nothing that would have thrown students and the topics were nicely mixed in the questions.
“The questions were clear and well structured, and students were guided in the right direction when answering the questions.
“On the long question, question seven featured functions and graphs and a mention of a maximum turning point. Students didn’t have to be able to differentiate to be able to do part f of the question, as it was already done for them. A lot of students do not like differentiation, so they will have been very happy with this.
“But students may have been thrown by the appearance of shapes in part B of question eight, as it normally appears on paper two,” Ms Kelly said.
Mr Toland said that the ordinary level paper had a very strong emphasis on algebra, making it very accessible for students with good algebra skills, especially considering the amount of choice available, but it would have been more challenging for students who are not so strong on this key topic.
