There has been a mixed reaction to higher-level maths paper one, but the element of choice allowed students to swerve trickier questions, teachers have said.
“Students who had prepared across the breadth of the course were generally well-rewarded, while those who had focused on a narrower range of topics may have found the paper more challenging than expected,” said Eoghan O’Leary, head of maths at TheTuitionCentre.ie and a maths teacher at Kinsale Community College in Cork.
“Many students found the level of interpretation, problem-solving and mathematical reasoning required to be demanding.”
One of the more unusual questions on this year’s higher-level maths paper one asked about the maths of tuning a piano, said O’Leary. “Candidates were asked to determine the frequency of musical notes relative to concert A.”
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Niall Duddy, ASTI subject representative and a teacher at Presentation College Athenry, said that this question struck a bum note. “I don’t want to make a song and dance about it, but students had trouble tuning into the question,” he said.
In recent years, dyslexic students and representative organisations have raised concerns that the maths exam is too wordy. This came about as a result of Project Maths, which aimed to use more real-world examples of maths as a way of making it more relevant to students, but has proven controversial.
The wordiness of the music question will have been tricky for some students, Duddy said. “I have raised these concerns repeatedly with the State Examinations Commission, but, that said, this year’s paper was less wordy than usual,” said Duddy.
Studyclix.ie mathematics teacher Stephen Begley, who teaches at Dundalk Grammar School, said the short questions in section A were followed by a far more challenging section B. “A superb set of short questions provided an ideal opening,” he said.
“Students were greeted with familiar bread and butter questions on surd equations, the factor theorem, DeMoivre’s theorem, sequences and series, differentiation and integration, alongside elements of financial maths.”
The long questions in section B were no walk in the park, Begley said. “Careful reading was needed to get into the frame of mind to take on some busy sequences and series in question nine, which closed with a workable substitution and equation.”
Duddy said that those who gambled on financial maths may have been disappointed in question 2B, while all teachers agreed that the paper was dominated by calculus, algebra and sequences & series.
“Students who had neglected sequences and series in particular may have found themselves under pressure, as the topic appeared in multiple questions and could not easily be avoided,” said O’Leary.
On the ordinary level paper, Jean Kelly, a maths teacher at the Institute of Education, said that students who struggled with the more abstract aspects of senior cycle maths will have found themselves in a comfortable and assured position.
“In section A, students will have had no issue finding their preferred five questions,” she said. “There were a few little tricky diagrams without numbers that might throw a more anxious student, but they are few and far between.”
In section B of the paper, students tackled real-world maths applications such as income tax, bus timetables and marathon training. “Students will be able to see how the skills practiced in the classroom can be applied to everyday life,” said Kelly.
Every year, some students inevitably leave any exam worried about the difficulty of particular questions, but the marking scheme is always adjusted to account for the level of difficulty.
