LEAVING CERT MATHS:AFTER A challenging first paper, the often dreaded paper II was greeted as "a welcome relief" by teachers of Leaving Cert ordinary level maths yesterday.

"They came out very happy," said ASTI subject representative Maria Kelly. "A lot of students wouldn't generally like the material in paper II, but they were much more content coming out of the exam hall today than they were on Friday."

There were no questions on the paper that caused students any real difficulty, according to Aidan Roantree, a teacher at the Institute of Education. "Paper II was a more appropriate paper for ordinary level candidates."

TUI subject representative Bríd Griffin said the paper started well, describing the first two questions as "typical and as predicted".

"It was a good start for students and that's very, very important," Ms Griffin said. "Many students start at the start and work their way through the questions, so questions one and two would have eased them nicely into the exam."

Question seven on statistics was a particular hit, according to Ms Kelly. Usually, in part B of that question, students are asked to draw an ogive, but candidates yesterday found the ogive drawn for them on the paper and they simply had to answer questions about it.

"That was a very easy question," said Ms Griffin. "A lot of students attempted that one."

"Probability, permutations and combinations is a love-it-or-hate-it question," Ms Kelly said. "My students were happy with it. The last part was a bit tricky, but that's only to be expected."

Time could have been a problem in a trigonometry question that looked shorter than it actually was. "The C part looked like it had two parts to it when it actually had three," said Ms Kelly. "Part B was a bit long as well."

A question on the circle was also challenging, she said. "Part B was trickier than usual. It would have been more suited to a part C perhaps."

Some teachers commented that the part Bs in some questions were more challenging than usual.

"There were a couple of questions where I thought the part B was actually more challenging than the part C," Ms Griffin said.

More than 50,000 Leaving Cert students sat the maths exam yesterday. The majority of those, almost 38,000, sat the ordinary level paper, making it the single-biggest exam in the Leaving Cert.

It was a happy end to an unsteady start for many. "Paper II will have come as a welcome relief to students," Ms Griffin said. "Hopefully it will balance out what went before."

Ms Kelly agreed. "It was simply a well-written, very fair paper . . . Students were very happy with it," she said.