Proof that a week is a long time in politics appears in Junior Cert

Junior Certificate maths exams concluded yesterday morning and higher level students needed to be skilled at diagrams to do well.

That was the view of Robert Chaney of the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland, who thought the circle theorems question was probably the most difficult. He said a question featuring the frame of a child’s swing may have been difficult for anybody with trouble using the formulae in the tables book provided in the exam.

It was a fair test of students’ interpretive and mathematical skills, believes TheMathsTutor.ie founder Eamonn Toland. He agreed that the garden swing question was one of the toughest, but thought candidates were given every assistance in the theorem question, as it provided the structure for the proof.