Louise Boylan and Aidan Roantree from The Institute of Education, give their expert opinion on Leaving Cert Maths Higher Level Paper 1 & Paper 2 - shared from their Leaving Cert Analysis series.
Aidan says that today's Paper 2 "was a challenge for everyone, which will have to be reflected in the marking."
Maths is another big one out of the way, so make sure to take a beat - here are some tips on nutrition, sleep and minding yourself.
Download the exam papers here from examinations.ie:
First up, RTÉ Study Hub regular Louise Boylan, maths teacher at The Institute of Education, looked back Leaving Cert Maths Higher Level Paper 1 exam - watch the video up top.
Key Points
- A paper with an off-putting appearance but many manageable elements.
- Continues the trend of pulling material from unexamined areas of the Project Maths Course.
Louise says: "Students likely won't feel triumphant as they leave the exam hall, but they shouldn’t feel defeated. While there was a lot that was out of the box - logic puzzle style questions, material that hasn’t appeared since the course’s overhaul - there was much that would be welcome. Algebraic skills, Rates of Change, Differential Calculus, and Sequence and Series would all have fallen into the familiar.
"Yet the elements of the paper that will stand out to everyone will be those more novel aspects, the things that past papers won’t have shown them. Within a number of questions there was something challenging. The 2nd part of Q2, the middle of Q4 and the end of Q5 all added stings to otherwise approachable questions. However, if students could take a moment to breathe and look past their initial reactions, they will see that the question setter has given some helpful hints. Question 4 (b) told you the theorem and expression to use and 5 (c) bolded the font of one line to draw the student’s attention to it.
"Later in the paper, Question 7’s wall of text will have caused some to pause, but once that was parsed, the underlying Sequences and Series were familiar. While Question 8 straddled a wide range of topics, Question 9 was neatly in line with previous work. The concluding Question 10 may have more resembled an aptitude test rather than an application of learned methods.
"This was a challenging paper but challenging for everyone sitting it as the question setter continues the trend of drawing from all corners of the course. As such there was material examined on the paper that simply wasn’t present in past exams and some students will rightly feel that they were pushed beyond their comfort zone. However, with much that will earn them marks, they shouldn’t focus solely on the negative – the marking will reflect the challenge.
Reaction to 2025 Leaving Certificate Maths Paper 2 (Higher Level) by Aidan Roantree, Maths teacher at The Institute of Education.
Aidan says: "Students who were anxious about their performance on Friday and hoping to find an easier paper today will have found no comfort in this paper. It continued the same mixture of the familiar and the quirky but on a larger scale with more of both. The question setter is consciously creating papers that are unlike previous years by adding novel questions that would have been hard to prepare for. Students looking for H2/H1s will find the paper particularly challenging as the difficulty builds towards the end of the paper.
"Upon opening the paper, students will have felt an initial confidence boost to get them going. Section A's Q1, Q,2, Q3 offered a reassuring and familiar start to the paper. This will have allowed students to accrue marks before venturing into the trickier sections. At Q4, the quirkier aspects of the paper emerged with questions that were evocative of pre-2015 statistics: interquartile ranges, averages, and later stratified sampling in Q10.
"Section B followed a similar pattern with approachable opening questions followed by mounting difficulty. In particular Q9’s part C was a very challenging probability question which would have tested the abilities of even the highest achievers. Indeed this paper contained some of the hardest questions on either paper, so students will leave the exam with a sense of having really pushed themselves.
"This paper was a challenge for everyone, which will have to be reflected in the marking. There were lots of places where students handled familiar material, but the inclusion of the novel elements will make it much more difficult to get those final few marks."
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