Reaction to Leaving Certificate 2026 Maths Paper 1 (H) by David Callan, Maths teacher at The Institute of Education.
- An accessible beginning followed by lengthy and conceptual Section B made the exam a marathon that rewarded those who kept moving.
- Students who had used past papers to scaffold their approach to the subject will have found lots of chances to gain valuable marks. But a few twists towards the end of questions will have pushed them into more abstracted reappraisals.
Opening the exam to Section A, students will have been able to gather some momentum in the short questions. Many of the prompts told them which method to use in approaching the problems and so this will have been a helpful prelude to the paper. Question 1 was a standard algebra which will have put everyone in familiar territory. The Financial Maths in Question 2 was drawn from the vault, harkening back to the style of questions asked at the beginning of Project Maths. Questions 3 and 4 on Integration and Complex Numbers respectively were accessible but the latter had a twist into simultaneous equations that will have seen the difficulty begin to increase. This will have been soothed slightly by Question 5 which called back to material often covered at the beginning of 5th Year. Question 6 was on a more difficult aspect of induction and its part B on factorials might have caught out those expecting to see it on Paper 2. Students only needed five of the six, so will have had ways to gather their marks in the first 50% of the paper.
Moving into Section B, many will have felt the momentum begin to slow as the questions were much wordier and more conceptual. Students might need to read multiple framing sentences before being able to launch into the mathematics of the problem. A reoccurring motif of this section was calculus which made an appearance on three of the four questions. Students who were confident with this topic will have found their skills thoroughly examined. It is at this point in the exam that some students might begin to feel overwhelmed and lose confidence. Some questions were marathons with nine parts, so students will have just had to keep moving forward to get through them. As a result many will feel tired and a little uncertain as the emerge out of their centres as the challenge of the final stretch looms large in their memory.
Yet it is really important to remember that the challenge of the paper is always reflected in the marking. The distribution of marks will mean that the scaling challenge will be reflected in the results. With papers like this it is easy to let the moments of challenge overshadow other successes, of which there were plenty for the prepared student.