Leaving Cert Reaction: How did Ordinary Level Leaving Cert Maths add up?
Jean Kelly from Dublin's Institute of Education is here to share her thoughts on the 2025 Leaving Cert Ordinary Level Maths Paper 1 exam. She is contributor to RTÉ Study Hub, and we have her expert tips from the show to help you prepare for Paper 2.
This content is from their Leaving Cert Analysis series. You can watch Jean's video up top and read on for more insights.
Jean says: "This paper had everything thrown in or at least as much of the syllabus as they could possibly fit in to just 10 questions. Students would have been surprised by the sudden jumps between topics. A question could start in algebra in Part A, move to calculus in Part B and rates of change in part C. Many might find this lack of uniformity gave them a bit of whiplash as they had to quickly adapt to new areas of the course on the fly.
"However, parts of the paper were lovely; not inaccessible at all, but you really needed to think. Questions had wordy window dressing to mask simple techniques that students would have already known. If you read carefully and pieced out the relevant material, you were flying, but you needed to know your concepts to make that call."
"Students really did need to read the question over and over to get a sense of what they are asking. Each part of a question might have a new story element to be disentangled from central mathematics, so questions often didn't build on each other. As a result, some students will have found the more purely mathematical questions easier and so may have preferred the traditionally harder Part Bs to the Part As. One shock will be the appearance of Area, Volume and Nets of a 3D object in Q10 Section B as this is usually preserved for Paper 2.
"There were lots of opportunities to get marks and secure their grades, but it was definitely exam that, at first glance, might have fallen outside of some students' comfort zones."
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