Reaction to 2025 Leaving Certificate Maths Paper 2 (Higher Level) by Aidan Roantree, Maths teacher at The Institute of Education.
- Familiar topics will help students earn marks early on, but the challenges grew as the paper progressed.
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.