Leaving Cert Maths: post-mortem: As 55,000 students sat the first of two papers in their maths Junior and Leaving Certificate examinations yesterday, the Union of Students in Ireland (USI) called for the current mathematics curriculum in schools to be revamped to include "the spirit of innovation and creative problem-solving".
Fewer than one in five Leaving Cert students do the higher level maths paper, compared to four in 10 Junior Cert students. The seeds of this growing disillusionment with maths were evident in the higher level paper 1.
Overly theoretical, the paper was slightly more difficult than last year's, said Dr Aidan Seery, a maths teacher at the Institute of Education and lecturer in the philosophy of education at Trinity College Dublin.
The "fascinating" part of the paper was question 6c (ii), which asked students to write down a sentence justifying a mathematical statement. Such a creative question could have thrown some students, because this type of question has never been raised before in a Leaving Cert paper, Dr seery said.
It tested abstract thinking skills rather than memorisation of formulae and was a good direction to go, he said. However, such innovation would not become standard until the approach to maths teaching was changed, he added.
Question 4c was so theoretical that it would have "tested the best", separating the A1s from the A2s, he added.
Indeed, it was the tricky "c" sections in parts one, four and seven that were the greatest challenge, according to the students of Terenure College, Dublin.
Mr Jim Healy, maths teacher and expert with skoool.ie, said that despite this the exam was well received by the students, some of whom even called it "excellent".
"Overall the paper was viewed as very fair, focusing on the course with not as many nasty surprises as expected. Many students will achieve a higher grade than they might have been expecting," said Mr Healy.
Dr Seery criticised the ordinary level paper 1 as "overly theoretical" and "awkward". The unnecessarily complex form of some questions, such as 8 (b) and (c), would result in as many students failing the exam this year as last, he predicted.
Mr Healy agreed that many students seemed to find this paper more difficult than last year's. Again, it was the awkward "c" parts of questions that caused the problems. The phrasing of question 7, part (c), in particular, was likely to have been misinterpreted by many students.
Most students who chose to take the foundation level of the first maths paper were relieved when they saw it, said Mr Healy. Question 6 was "brilliant", with many expecting full marks.