Honours paper divides opinion and adds up to whole lot of heartache

Huge gap still evident as prevailing mood far more upbeat among ordinary and foundation level students, writes RONAN McGREEVY

THE DIFFERENCE between higher level and ordinary level Leaving Certificate mathematics is like Rudyard Kipling’s definition of the difference between East and West – “never the twain shall meet”.

The gap remains as wide as ever and so too was the reaction to both papers among the students of the Institute of Education gathered outside Leeson Street yesterday evening.

The ordinary level students seemed to be uniformly pleased with Paper I which carried few surprises. The reaction among the honours students was less upbeat.

Student Harriet Walsh was glad she switched to ordinary level maths after getting just 17 per cent in honours maths in her mock exams.

“There is still a huge gap. Ordinary level is basically Junior Cert maths, honours maths is rocket science,” she said.

There were no surprises on the ordinary level paper. Sarah McGann said it was “not easy but good” and was expecting a high B or an A.

Kevin Kavanagh from Rathfarnham described it as “pretty fair”.

There were good reports also of the foundation level paper and Ronan O’Donoghue, who struggles with algebra, found it a veritable stroll in the park.

“I did every question on the paper in an hour and I was not even meant to do every question. It was that easy. I can’t wait for Paper 2.

“I just can’t understand algebra. Maths is supposed to have numbers not letters in it,” he added.

The reputation of honours maths as the boot-camp subject of the Leaving Certificate was apparent from reaction to Paper 1. One student, who did not want to give his name, said he was heading for “an all-round fail” if he repeats what happened in Paper 1.

“A lot of the questions were asked in a different way to what we expected. The proof by induction question was was quite confusing,” he said.

Cillian Murphy from Wicklow said it was “hard enough but not terrible” explaining that the problem with higher level mathematics is that even when you can predict the topics, there is so much work on each of those topics that there is only so much preparation that a student can do.

“The six topics that I found easiest, a few people were complaining about like integration and complex numbers,” he said adding that he was confident of a high B or a low A depending on the second paper which is on Monday.

Eman Awan said the algebra questions were “grand”, but the differentiation and integration questions were “really difficult”.

She said a question about local maximums or local minimums, the type of question only honours maths students seem to get, was too difficult to attempt.

Beth Carthy from Monkstown said she benefited from having a good teacher but that the exam was still hard.

“The algebra was alright. I didn’t do the sequence and series one. I found the integration one hard and the (c) part of the differentiation was hard as well, but apart from that it was alright,” she said.