Exams commission acknowledges error in Irish version of LC maths paper

The State Examinations Commission (SEC) has acknowledged that an error in the Irish version of the higher level maths paper may have caused confusion for candidates earlier this week.

It affected up to 2,000 candidates who sat the Irish version of the maths paper two on Monday morning.

A spokeswoman for the commission confirmed that an error occurred which was regretted by the SEC. The English version of the paper was unaffected.

The spokeswoman added that it is the SEC’s core principle that “candidates cannot be disadvantaged as a result of an error on an examination paper”.

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In line with its protocol on dealing with exam error, she said this will be “taken fully into account when marking the work of candidates who answered the paper through Irish”.

The error was contained in question eight of the paper, which is worth a total of 50 marks. Section B of the question contained two references to the same correlation coefficient.

However, in the Irish version, the second reference to the correlation coefficient was translated incorrectly.

Candidates and teachers who spotted the error said the question made “no sense” as a result, and left some students “bewildered”.

Some said they spent a significant amount of time on the question before giving up.

Niall Mac Uidhilin, whose daughter spotted the error, and Eoghan Ó Ceallaigh, principal of Coláiste na Coiribe in Galway, discussed the matter on RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta’s Iris Aniar programme on Thursday.

Mr Mac Uidhilin said his daughter initially thought that the fault lay with her own lack of understanding.

“She said that there was something in the question that made no sense to her. She had to give up on it,” he said.

“She had already done two pages of work on the question, so she had wasted a certain amount of time, and then she had to go and find another question to answer instead ... She thought there was something she hadn’t seen or understood, that she was the problem.

“It’s important to highlight it, who knows, there must be other students who have been affected who don’t know that it was an error in the translation, and that they were not to blame.”

Eoghan Ó Ceallaigh, principal of Coláiste na Coiribe in Galway, said not many people had come to him about the error, but when he and the maths teachers went to check, it was clear there was a mistake in the paper.

“Most students probably didn’t understand that it was a mistake. There are likely lots of students who did the exam who don’t know. You would have to compare the English and Irish versions of the papers to understand the question.”

Mr Ó Ceallaigh said the school contacted the SEC about the matter on Wednesday.

“They are usually good in cases like this, they know that things like this happen. They’ll have to discuss the implications of this mistake now for the marking system,” he said.

“There’s no fixing it now, the error happened, and it might have brought additional stress for pupils. The main thing for me now is that there is equality for all students, and the SEC now has to look at that and come up with a marking scheme that makes sure it’s fair for all the students who sat the paper through Irish.”

A spokesperson for the SEC said it had procedures in place to enhance reliability and to minimise error in advance of papers going to press.

“Despite these procedures, it is an unfortunate fact that errors can and do occur on examination papers from time to time. Consequently, the SEC, like all examination and assessment organisations, has robust structures in place to deal with errors in when they occur. These are also set out in the SEC document entitled How the SEC Deals with Error in Examination Papers.