SEC: No students affected by maths paper error

The State Examinations Commission says none of the 520 students it believes were affected by a major error in one of June’s higher-level maths exams will have lost out on marks.

It issued the assurance as it detailing the rigorous procedure used to address the problems that arose after the Leaving Certificate Paper 2, sat by a record 13,014 students, was discovered to have a major mistake.

Students who attempted the trigonometry question in a particular way would have found that the triangle described in the question, which did not contain the error in the Irish-language version, could not exist.

The SEC says the evidence from its identification exercise during marking of the exams suggests about 4% of students were affected. Although teachers said it would be impossible to account for lost time or the distraction caused by the mistake, the commission said it was “satisfied that the strategies used were effective in addressing disadvantage caused to those candidates who were affected by the errors on this paper”.

After examiners identified those students who appeared to have been affected, a specific marking scheme was applied to their papers, and the effectiveness was monitored by senior examiners. The SEC carried out further comparisons of the students’ final grades with those of similar-standard students on Paper 2 alone, and on the combination of both maths papers.

It also analysed the marks of all 12,500 students who did not seem to be affected to see if any had significant unexpected differences between their performance in both higher-level papers, which led to 10 more scripts being reviewed.

“The review confirmed that none of the 10 candidates showed any evidence of having been affected by the error in Question 8,” said the SEC.

The system used to identify affected students and the amended marking scheme will be published along with marking schemes for all papers later this month and students will be entitled to appeal a grade in the same way as normal.

The error was one of a number of mistakes in this year’s exams for both Junior and Leaving Certificates.

“The level of error was higher than normal,” said the SEC. “The SEC wishes to again apologise to candidates who may have been affected by these regrettable errors.”

Education Minister Ruairi Quinn, who has just received a report from the SEC on the errors in maths papers, said he will take a few days before making any further comment.

John Devlin, founder of Positivemaths.ie, said the mistake in the higher-level question could have shaken the confidence of students, but he commended the SEC’s actions to identify the impact.

“The special protocol it actioned to analyse the extent of the disadvantage on students’ performance was exceptionally thorough and a prime example of the importance of maths skills in the workplace,” he said.