Was Maths Paper One a stinker ?
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The Pat Kenny Show. With Timber Living Log Cabins. Saturday and Sunday from 10am on Newstalk. Conversation that counts. Well, now, we want to talk about one of those stories I mentioned in my headlines, and that's about Maths Paper One. We're joined by Eoin O'Leary, Head of Maths at the Jurisdiction Centre.ie and a teacher at Kinsale Community School. Eoin, good morning.
Good morning, Pat. Thanks for having me on again.
Now, there's been a lot of kerfuffle online about Maths Paper One being a bit of a stinker. What do you think?
Well, yes, the first thing to say for students and their parents, just to put their mind at ease, students will score better in paper one than they actually felt on the day.
What challenges did students face in Maths Paper One?
And students did, a lot of students did find it hard and some students found it very hard. And to give a bit of an analogy here, if they were in a marathon, it kind of started off okay, but the last few miles they found were like they were running uphill into the wind when they were coming to the finish line. So they did find that very tough.
Now, I've looked at the paper this morning and paper one is kind of classic mathematics. You know, you use various formulae, you do, I suppose, classic deduction and so on. And if you're good at that kind of calculation, it's fairly straightforward. See, section one, section one.
Absolutely, section A, absolutely, Pat. And what I would say, just what you described there is what teachers, including myself and others, our first reaction when we looked at the paper was that section A, question one to six, were not too bad because they were what you might describe the classic type of questions. While not being easy... people would identify where the maths was and they would kind of know what to do.
When I started off on Section A, Question 1, Part A, solve this equation, 5 equals 1 plus the square root of 8 plus 7. And like it took me 20 seconds to get that, the answer is 9. So I would have been greatly encouraged with that. You know, that's dead simple.
That was a good start. And Pat, in fairness, you're on 10 out of 10 for that part. And the good news for students is that there were, I'm going to say, some accessible parts such as the one you just described there. And the reality is this. Those parts will be worth a lot of marks when it comes to the marking scheme. because I was looking to have a great teacher named Joe Kingston, and he corrected state exams for 50 years.
How do teachers assess the difficulty of Maths Paper One?
And he always said the reality is a hard paper must be marked generously. That's the way it has to go, because there has to be the bell curve that they expect at the end. And as you said, there were some parts in there like you would have been greatly encouraged at the start. 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.
Now, that's right. I mean, there's a question about piano tuning. And I must say that it, you know, it boggled me. This is in Section B of Paper 1. I looked at that and I thought, how do I even begin this?
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.
Yeah, like we had in this particular paper one, we had Ria who has a mortgage or she's borrowing to buy a car and we're doing compound interest and all of that.
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