A few years ago, Prof David Malone saw a childhood friend on social media complaining that the modern maths curriculum had been dumbed down.
There was, he lamented, no sign of complex numbers, matrices or calculus in today’s exams compared to the old Intermediate Certificate in the late 1980s.
Malone dug out a copy of his old Intermediate Cert exam paper from 1989 – “I never throw anything out,” he says. None of those topics, it turned out, had ever featured on the old Inter Cert papers.
“My friend joked that it just confirmed that his memory was terrible,” laughs Malone. “But it shows how we often project our adult self back on our teenage years. We tend to overestimate our abilities. Questions which now seem easier to you seemed hard at the time.”
It sparked the beginning of a quest to collect State exam papers going all the way back to 1925, the year of the very first Leaving Cert exams.
The exam papers reveal much about social, political and educational priorities of the day.
Irish
For starters, a tiny proportion of the population – just 955 students – sat the first Leaving Cert exam.
“In 1925, you’re probably only doing the Leaving Cert if you’re moderately academic, moderately wealthy,” Malone says. “The numbers expanded over the years, particularly with the change in the 1960s and free secondary education.”
An education commission, under the authority of the Dáil in the early 1920s, recommended that the new exams be available bilingually; that history and geography papers be arranged in such a way as to allow a student obtain full marks with questions relating to Ireland; and that Irish be compulsory.
Gender
Gender attitudes and expectations of the time leap out from some of the papers.
The technical drawing paper for 1925 has a “boys only” section which asked candidates to draw a spanner to the dimensions provided, while the “girls only” section required students to draw a border for a damask tablecloth and to “design embroidery for ladies wear”.
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In the 1930s, an “elementary mathematics for girls only” maths paper was introduced. On the face if, it sounds like another appallingly sexist attitude of the time.
Malone, however, notes that the aim of the paper was actually to keep girls engaged with the subject at a time when there was an acute lack of maths teachers in all-girls’ schools.
“I stumbled on a report on challenges facing the education system in the late 1920s,” he says. “It says ‘there is a dearth of good mathematical teachers, and the absence of girl candidates for honours Leaving Cert in mathematics gives us reason to fear there will be a continuation of the present dearth’. So, they knew there was a problem and they were trying to fix it.”
The girls-only maths exam ended in 1968.
Biology
There was also no biology exam in the 1920s. Instead, there were two related papers: botany and physiology & hygiene. It took until the early 1970s for biology to appear, replacing the other two.
What is striking is how short exam papers were at the time. Most consist of just one or two pages. There were few, if any, graphs, pictures or diagrams to help students understand what was being asked of them.
Today’s exam papers may be 30 or 40 pages long, with space to answer directly on to the script.
“There was also a very different style of question at the time,” Malone says. “The early physics papers ask questions like, ‘Write me an essay about heat’. And that is the level of detail; you’re expected to know what to provide.
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“Whereas if you look at questioning now, the style is different. It’s more structured. You’re expected to give a bit more comprehension of the thing ... [and there’s] maybe slightly more probing of, ‘Do you get what’s going on here’,” he says.
So, is there any real evidence to show that the exams were easier – or harder – a century ago?
“Well, what we can say is that they are different,” Malone says. “When you look at some of the really early maths exams, they look really hard by modern standards. Some of it is of a standard that might be taught in first or second year at university ... but if you look at the contemporary textbook to see what they were being taught, we found one of the harder questions had a solution that was just three lines long and you could learn it off by heart; another hard question was actually an exercise in one of the textbooks.”
To obtain a pass, a student had to pass five subjects including English or Irish (the latter became an obligatory subject for passing the Leaving from 1934 until 1973). A pass was 40 per cent and honours was 60 per cent.
Which brings us on to one of the many contemporary criticisms of the Leaving Cert: is it just a glorified memory test which rewards students who regurgitate what they have learned off?
Malone says the allegation is as old as the exams themselves – even older, in fact.
He quotes the recommendations of a government-sponsored education commission in 1898, which referenced the precursor to the Leaving Cert, known as the Intermediate Education Board examinations. “‘The papers set in the examinations should be of such a character as to (1) test the true educational work as distinct from mere overloading of the memory; (2) be within the capacity of a well-taught pupil of average ability.’
“So, we’ve always been trying to avoid cramming stuff into people’s memories. Examiners have always wanted to promote understanding. If it was a problem 100 years ago, then it’s not an easy one to solve.”
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That said, Malone feels rote-learning isn’t as widespread as people think.
“Maths is hard to learn off by heart. Modern languages as well. Maybe to an extent in history and some English, but it’s not as bad as it’s sometimes made out to be,” he says.
In some respects, what is striking is how little – fundamentally – has changed in the nature of the assessments over much of the past century.
The duration of the exams are similar, with two and a half to three hours each, and the bulk of marks still comes down to how a candidate performs in a written exam.
What has changed dramatically is the nature of the competition or “points race”.
This year, about 60,000 candidates will sit the exams and about 70 per cent will aim to progress to higher education. Entry requirements for the most prestigious courses are sky high and can require maximum grades across all subjects. Even then, some places are awarded by lottery.
The pressure cooker experience has been blamed for high rates of anxiety and “teaching to the test” in classrooms. The criticism is partly a driving factor behind the most ambitious reforms of the Leaving Cert in a century, due to roll out from next September.
They involve revising subjects to ensure there is less emphasis on written exams and more placed on project work or additional components of assessment worth a minimum of 40 per cent.
It has sparked criticism among teachers’ unions who argue that the changes pose a threat to education standards, fairness and quality. Minister for Education Norma Foley, however, has signalled that she is not for turning.
“The Leaving Certificate as we know it is 100 years old this year,” Ms Foley said. “I absolutely accept that change is never comfortable. But I think 100 years on, I don’t think our students can wait any longer.”
Check your own Leaving Cert paper:
The archive, which focuses on Stem subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) is available to view at: http://archive.maths.nuim.ie/staff/dmalone/StateExamPapers/
‘It was a slog. I need to lie down’: An Oxford professor sat the Leaving Cert maths exam. How did he fare?
In 2023 the Leaving Cert maths paper became headline news.
Students, teachers and parents complained that maths paper one was excessively difficult as many candidates left exam halls in distress.
“It was an awful shock,” said one Leaving Cert student. “I saw so many other girls leaving the exam hall in tears. There was trauma on their faces.”
RTÉ's Liveline dedicated its entire programme to an “avalanche” of calls and messages from parents and students.
So, how difficult is the exam for a top mathematician? And how does it compare to other end-of-school assessments in other jurisdictions?
Dr Tom Crawford, who teaches maths at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge, decided to try his hand at the same exam in real time on YouTube.
His assessment?
“It was a slog. 300 marks, I need to lie down,” he said afterwards. “I’m exhausted ... my brain is melted.”
He agreed that some sections had what looked like “horrible questions” and confessed that he found some of the computational questions more challenging.
Nonetheless, he scored 298 marks out of 300, based on the published marking scheme.
When compared to 10 other end-of-school exams in the UK, Germany, Australia, US and elsewhere, Dr Crawford said it ranked somewhere around the middle.
“This felt very similar to the A-levels,” he said. “Harder than the American ones I’ve been doing ... not quite as hard as the German Abitur, so somewhere between A-level and Abitur.”
