Reaction to Leaving Certificate 2026 Maths Paper 2 (H) by Aidan Roantree, Maths teacher at The Institute of Education.
- More familiar questions with the proportion of innovative, challenging and conceptual questions scaled back.
Students entering today’s exam will have been anxious after Friday’s paper but will leave feeling that they performed better. They were not given a free ride as most questions involved some sting, and not always in the tail.
The first questions of Section A will have given students a reassuring start on some steady, familiar ground allowing them to gather important marks early on. The challenge starts to increase around Question 4, whose difficulty is not apparent at first glance and will only reveal its sting once students have gotten into it. This became a trend for other questions too as the familiar starts gave way to novel challenges.
Moving into Section B, Question 7 was on trigonometry, the predominant topic of Paper 2. While the introductory sections were approachable, the move into counting techniques in the final stretch will have pushed students’ comfort zones. The single most approachable question in this section was Question 8, a mix of correlation with minor elements of trig and probability. No matter which three questions out of four a student chose, at least two will have had a tricky bit. The challenges themselves where not minor but in the scheme of the exam as a whole they constituted a minor portion. This is perhaps most notable in the Questions 9 and 10. The former begins with a reassuringly structured task but ramps up to the trapezoidal rule in a manner that will catch many out. Similarly Question 10’s (a) and (b) parts will be familiar but (c) novel and one of the least approachable questions on the paper. But in spite of these, students’ reactions to the Section B questions will likely have been favourable both now and on reflection.
Students will feel better about this paper when compared to Paper 1 but that does not diminish the reality of the challenges presented here.