Mr. Ciar?n Duffy:

They have no idea what is expected of them in that two-hour exam. I know that in English, a number of years ago, they ended up spending two or three weeks studying Shakespeare and there was no opportunity to write about Shakespeare on the exam paper. While we can say the skills are transferable and that they have learned skills they can adapt to other situations and scenarios, for a 15-year old student, they are not seeing it like that. They could very easily spend a huge amount of time learning a particular discipline or skill in mathematics and then not have any assessment element of that on their one exam paper. Obviously, by having one exam paper, we have a reduced opportunity to assess a vast array of skills. In addition, because of the unifying strand at junior cycle, everything is now interwoven with other aspects, so there is very little opportunity to just do a traditional question as we would have had it ourselves a number of years ago, for example, an algebra question or a statistics question.

Everything is interwoven, so there is a statistics question that involves a bit of co-ordinate geometry, probability and various other things. While that is fine, does it need to be for the entire examination paper? There is definitely scope for investigating both models and for perhaps having one paper that is different from the other.

I am not sure the one-size-fits-all model in the junior cycle is working as well as it could be. On bonus points, we surveyed our members on this. There is an idea that an awful lot of students are now accessing higher level maths at leaving certificate. The numbers have skyrocketed since 2012 with the introduction of project maths, which is fantastic. We certainly would not call for the removal of the bonus points but we need to be very careful that there are students who are accessing the correct level of mathematics for their ability. There is a huge number of students across the country who are insisting on doing higher level maths at leaving certificate who quite frankly probably are not able for it at that stage of their mathematical or educational development. They are only doing it for this need of the 25 additional points. In the survey of our members, the idea came back very clearly of having a scaled model, starting at 25 points for the H1 and working down in segments of five points, as opposed to 25 marks for everybody who gets a H6 or above.