There were mostly sighs and smiles of relief all around as students came out of their higher and ordinary-level maths papers at lunchtime yesterday. They weren't as stressed as the day before. They'd had to solve a few tricky problems but on the whole the vibe was good. The relieved Junior Cert. students who had a tough higher-level paper one on Thursday seemed happier after completing paper two. Some even started to smile. If they had done badly in the first paper, maybe they'd pick up a better grade with a good paper two, which was judged to be easier and nicer. Maybe things weren't that bad after all.
"It was quite a nice paper," said Mr Thomas O'Connor, TUI subject representative and a teacher at St Paul's Community College in Waterford. "Most students would have been quite happy with it, there was plenty of work that they would have been able to do; there were only one or two of the difficult parts that they didn't like," he said, singling out part of a geometry question - part (b) of question 3 - in particular. The paper was "not as difficult as yesterday's", he said. "This made up for it."
Another teacher in Galway made similar comments. Mr Cammie Gallagher, chairman of the Maths Teachers' Association in Galway and a teacher at St Jarlath's College in Tuam, said the paper was "easier than yesterday". "It was straightforward enough. In general, it was a nice test for them and a good paper. What they dread is the theorems and question 3 and the problem were relatively easy." He said some students "would have had difficulty in the last part of the trigonometry question".
However, Ms Maria Kelly, a teacher at Bishopstown Community School in Cork, described the higher level paper as "testing enough and there were a number of questions with stings in the tail", she said, listing questions 2 and 6 in particular. "Normally they love to do question 2; it's a banker for them usually," she said. "But this year there's a twist in part (b) and they were asked for something that they wouldn't normally get."
As for the last question on the paper, question 6, part 2 of this was "ambiguous", she said. "It confused the students and even some of us who were asked about it afterwards. It's not clear what the examiner wants. But because it's the last part of the paper it didn't put them off."
Ms Eileen Scanlon, ASTI subject representative and a teacher at Salerno Secondary School in Galway, said: "Most students seemed satisfied with it, although a number found question 4 difficult. Geometry is always challenging and it was".
