If you sat your final Leaving Cert paper yesterday, you've probably just completed the longest two-and-a-half weeks of your life.

Aside from problems with aurals on the earlier language papers, this year's exams have been fairly controversy-free. However, on the home-straight students found their endurance tested.

"The general layout and space seemed good - there were no obvious mistakes and the language was typical," Christy Maginn, a teacher at St Declan's College, Cabra, Dublin, said of the applied-maths papers at both levels. However he said some questions may have "unnerved" students.

"The diagrams, where they appeared on the higher paper, were clear, accurate and well labelled." However, question 2, which appeared without a diagram, "could have benefitted from one".

Questions 3 and 5 were very long and were "more a test of endurance than ability" he said.

Question 10(a) unnerved quite a few students, Maginn said. "A lot of students rely on this question, and while I wouldn't say it was unfair, it did contain an untypical beginning."

The ordinary-level paper relied more on diagrams and was in general "a fair and honest" test of knowledge, but some questions were overly long, he said.