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.

For ordinary level candidates, Mr Chaney said Paper 2 was not easy, but it was a reasonable exam. The one difficulty, he said, is that many students would have difficulty with the level of reasoning required as part of the new Project Maths syllabus.

He said the paper’s structure allowed candidates work through each question step by step. There was not much guidance on the co-ordinate geometry question, although diagrams were pre-drawn for students in most questions, and the scale for a map of a reality TV show island was not the most conventional.

* The proof of the length of a week in politics was seen on the Junior Certificate exam in civic, social, and political education, where two of four pictured Cabinet ministers have changed or are about to change roles.

They were Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore — who will give up his leadership of the Labour Party next month — and Frances Fitzgerald, who recently moved from her role as Children’s Minister to the Department of Justice, but that was after the exam papers were printed. Her move was accounted for by a direction to all students from superintendents to write in the words “or former title” into the question which asked them to match the photographed politicians to four given titles.

Students were also told in their exam centres of a discrepancy between the total 19 marks for individual questions in the first section, and the figure of 18 students were told on the instructions page were going for the section. Both corrections were issued by the State Examinations Commission to all Junior Cert exam halls, and ASTI subject spokesman Donal McCarthy said the statements were straightforward enough not to trouble students.

He was pleased with the appearance on the paper of Nelson Mandela, who died last December, and local and European elections, as two topical and recent issues. So too, he said, was homelessness, an issue which came up in the context of a question about a Focus Ireland fundraising event.

Brendan Green of the Teachers’ Union of Ireland said this common-level exam was a fair assessment of all units and concepts on the course, but parts of the short question on courts and by-laws might have been a bit technical for some students. He also welcomed the topical election questions, and another on online safety and cyberbullying.

The CSPE Teachers’ Association considered it a well-balanced paper, with a diverse range of topical issues.