Junior Cert paper challenges perceptions of maths concepts

The first maths papers for Junior Certificate students were taken yesterday evening and around 32,000 were taking the higher level exam.

Sat, 07 Jun, 2014 - 01:00

Niall Murray

Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (ASTI) spokesman, Robert Chaney, thought it was fair, keeping as it did to the Project Maths syllabus principle of challenging student perceptions of maths concepts.

Mr Chaney said there was an emphasis on the use and interpretation of graphs, an accessible algebra questions, and a nice question on exchange rates.

Students expecting to see Pythagoras’ theorem on Monday’s Paper 2 might have been surprised to find it in yesterday’s exam, and Mr Chaney thought a question on the height of water in containers would have been tricky for some students.

For ordinary level students, he said the key to success was an ability to read and interpret the questions, which may have proved difficult for some.

It was a reasonable exam in which questions were structured well and a quadratic graph was quite accessible, but he thought students might have had difficulties with the questions that asked them to calculate the pre-Vat price of a newspaper and to calculate a change of speed in fitness test.

n Junior Certificate geography in the morning featured a higher level exam which ASTI spokesman, Jimmy Staunton, thought some students struggled to finish in time.

He said that the wide range of questions examined topics they would have learned over the last two years, from population studies to physical geography subjects like coasts or glaciation.

Well-practiced skills also featured, such as those related to the Ordnance Survey map, and an aerial photograph question on tourism.

Mr Staunton said that a couple of short questions were tricky but any student who was familiar with previous exams should not have had any major problems.

Teachers’ Union of Ireland spokeswoman, Marie Kennedy, said the paper was fair, offering students plenty of choice from wide-ranging questions.

The ordinary level exam showed the kind of differentiation that distinguishes candidates from those at higher level, a feature Mr Staunton believes remains welcome ahead of common-level exams for the future Junior Cycle Student Award.

He thought that it wasa very fair paper, with a particularly good aerial photograph question.

Ms Kennedy said most ordinary level candidates should be pleased with an exam which was predictable and very fair.

There were mixed views ahead of yesterday’s maths exams once again; and, afterwards, some simple solutions were offered by students for the complex problems they had been asked to solve.