Eoghan O'Leary

And then when you hit the harder parts, the reality for the students on the Friday evening, coming up to maybe half three, four o'clock after a long week doing exams and prepping for the exams, it just was tough at the end.

And some of them said the section B was where it started to feel like a puzzle.

Yes.

And so for questions like that, so you mentioned the classic maths.

So questions one to six, Section A, they were what the old-fashioned typical maths.

But the Section B is now context and applications called problem solving.

And while the topics in there...

calculus, area and volume, sequences and series, things like that.

They weren't the kind of expected ones.

They came up in an unusual way.

And what you're describing there about the piano tuning, that was an exponential function.

But what the students kind of felt and what they experienced in the pressure of the exam hall was that they felt it was like an English exam.

They were trying to read through all those texts to get to the maths.

Well, Pat, I think it's fair to say that the students and their parents and their teachers would agree with you after Friday.

And it was those wordy questions that took so long to kind of figure out.

And as I said, the pressure of the exam, that can be such a difficult experience for students that in the question you described, you know, by the time they get to the end of that, they mightn't have even known John was on the bus because...

You know, it just was, it got so confusing for them at a certain point.

And as they see the clock ticking towards half four and after all the hard work they put in during the year, that's the feeling they leave the hall with.

Now, it is important to note that in the cold light of day and in the days afterwards, they will have got far more marks than they feel because they remember the part where

They'll remember the part where they didn't get something right.