Last year's Junior Certificate higher level maths exam showed a downward trend in the standard of results that is "noteworthy and worrying", according the Chief Examiner's report.
The report on the 1996 higher level exam - taken by the most advanced 35 per cent of the students - points to the falling number of students gaining honours over the previous three years. It says the reasons for the deterioration in standards need to be "found and examined".
Concern is expressed that there was "a larger than usual proportion of candidates who were ill-prepared for the examination. Many such candidates displayed a poor grasp of the skills and knowledge required by the syllabus for the higher-level course".
The examiners suggest that the length of that syllabus might not leave enough time for "revision and consolidation of topics. As a result, some candidates take the examination with a hazy idea of parts of the course and this does not stand up to the rigours of in-depth testing."
Among the main areas of weakness were algebra, fractions, percentages, functions, logarithms and theorems. However, the report also notes improved performances in trigonometry, statistics, calculations involving decimals, and geometry.
These findings will be particularly worrying in view of the increased emphasis on higher-level maths as a path to new high technology jobs. The percentage of Junior Cert students doing higher level maths has grown slowly but steadily since 1992, and statistics due to be published next week show a 58 per cent rise in those doing higher level maths at Leaving Cert since 1993.
Mr Sean Ashe of the Irish Mathematics Teachers Association agreed that the Junior Cert higher-level course was one of the longest to teach and hardest to revise. He said a National Council for Curriculum and Assessment course committee had prepared a revised course which reduced, in particular, the geometry element.
He also said there were more distractions for students now - notably live soccer on television every night - than when the course was designed in the early 1980s. Other teachers pointed to the problems of teaching a difficult subject to larger numbers of pupils in mixed-ability classes.
Last year was also the first time the new foundation level Irish Leaving Cert syllabus was examined. This lower-standard course was introduced in 1995 following a high failure rate in ordinary level Irish in the previous two years.
More than 41 per cent of candidates scored a C grade, with another 33 per cent scoring B and only just over three per cent failing. The examiners found that candidates did better in the written, listening and comprehension exams than in the oral tests, where a grade D was the most common result. Senior Department officials said yesterday it was more important that students "do relatively well at a level at which they are capable, rather than fail at a higher level".
Just over 5,000 students out of the nearly 49,000 who took Leaving Cert Irish last year sat the exam at foundation level. Around 2,000 candidates had transferred from higher or ordinary level to foundation level between March and June of the final year of the two-year course.
Other major subject areas covered by the examiners' reports were Junior Cert Irish, modern languages, art and crafts, and music; and Leaving Cert applied maths, art and crafts, physics, chemistry and engineering.