Leaving Cert maths: paper II post-mortem: Maths teachers described their students as "agitated" and "distressed" after the higher-level Leaving Cert Paper II. At the High School in Rathgar, Dublin, top students were crying in the toilets and this reaction was repeated at other schools.
The paper included an applied maths question (8) which was not on the general maths syllabus and which many found impossible to answer. But the problems didn't start there.
Anxiety was piqued with the first question, which was so difficult to understand that students who had planned to spend 22 minutes on it ended up spending 35 minutes and more. It shook their confidence and threw them off-balance for the rest of the exam.
Mr Jim Healy, of Terenure College, described the paper as "substantially more difficult" than last year's.
"Many students were unhappy with this paper and in truth there were time-wasting traps everywhere. The result of this was that students got behind schedule and, in trying to rush to finish the exam, they made a lot of unnecessary mistakes," he said.
Dr Aidan Seery of the Institute of Higher Education agreed: "This was not an easy start to the paper, which is a little unfortunate. The first question should be something to put them at ease, rather than to challenge them."
Adding to the confusion was the fact that the superintendent at the beginning of each test centre was supposed to read out a correction to question 1. The State Examinations Commission reported that it received a complaint that this question was read out late into the exam in one school.
Special criticism was also levelled at question 8 part (c), which more properly belonged on the applied maths paper. "Ridiculous" was one student's description of the question, which made no sense to anyone who had not studied applied maths.
"I hope this is taken into account during the marking," Mr Healy commented. Dr Seery also expressed the view that there could be scope in the marking scheme to "tweak" grades, considering the inappropriateness of question 8.
Questions 2, 3 and 6 were generally regarded as fair and standard, but unfortunately time was an issue answering these because after the elusive question 1, everything else was a struggle for most students.
As higher-level students struggled, those taking the ordinary level paper II experienced a sense of relief when they discovered that it was less theoretical than ordinary level paper 1. There was nothing unexpectedly challenging for the diligent student, said Dr Seery.
Mr Healy commented: "There was a degree of apprehension in the air beforehand. The acid test was that very few students left early."
There was one exception, though. In question 1(b), students were asked to copy and measure, as best they could, a curved diagram, which would have been impossible. No two students could have come up with the same answer.
"This exercise is of no value and given the multitude of different answers that can be expected, pity the poor fools trying to correct it," Mr Healy commented.
The foundation level paper was a fair test of the course. A student looking for "an easy way out" by opting for this course will have been surprised at how thorough the exam was.
"It's a real pity that this course does not get the recognition it deserves," Mr Healy said.