Sebastian Bicen

So the maths paper was sat last week.

It's the first A-level maths paper.

And usually after an exam, you can kind of get a sense of how students have found it.

And I would say when the students came out of the exam hall, there was just an overwhelming sense of, wow, that was tough.

That was really challenging.

And since that happened, there has kind of gathered quite a bit of pace online with the petition of students saying this exam was too hard.

This exam was too tough.

So there's a few things.

I think one of the things was that many of the questions had quite horrible answers.

And what I mean by that is, in maths, if you do a question and you expect to get an answer that's an integer, a whole number, or something that looks quite clean, it usually gives you a little sort of wink and a nudge of, yeah, you've done this question correct.

But instead, they were ending up with quite sort of nasty looking numbers.

I would never say an ugly number.

I would never say that as a mathematician.

But things like 231 over 47 or long decimals.

And what that tends to do is create a sense of sort of like maths paranoia of, am I doing this question correct?

And for young people, naturally, where it's quite a high stakes exam, this can lead to a bit of a domino effect of starting to panic.

And that panic sort of seeps into other areas of the exam paper as well.

So I think when we look at the bigger picture, I would agree with that.

The same proportion of students will end up with the A stars.

The same proportion of students will end up with the A's.