Most students and their teachers appeared happy with the three hours of number-crunching which went into the accounting paper.
Students were said to be exhausted, but reckoned it was a fair paper. The only caveat entered by teachers concerned the layout, which looked cramped. The print size was described as "extremely small".
Sister Mary O'Connell, of St Joseph's Secondary School in Kilkee, Co Clare, was unhappy with the layout. "At the back of the exam paper are several blank pages. Maybe some of that space should have been used," she said. Questions 3, 6 and 7 were cramped, she said, and reading them could have slowed students down.
John Crilly, ASTI subject representative and principal of Ardee Community School, Co Louth, said the print size did seem small.
The higher-level paper was challenging but fair, O'Connell said. She said students were asked to do a revaluation several times in the paper, which seemed strange.
Questions 1 and 2 were "doable", but question 3 (the revaluation of fixed assets) was tricky. Crilly said it came up about three years ago, but it was likely to cause students some problems. O'Connell said question 4 (the cash-flow statement) was "delightful".
Question 5 (interpretation of accounts) was made a little easier for students because ratios and figures for the year were given. Crilly said question 6 (on a service firm) may have caught some students by surprise. "It was on the paper last year so some students may have gambled on it not coming up," he said. "But it's on the syllabus, to be fair."
On question 8 (marginal costing) a little spanner was thrown into the works in the shape of a sales commission of 5 per cent. "Putting that in made the question a little more difficult, because it had to be factored in," O'Connell said.
The ordinary-level paper was fair but challenging, Crilly said. The first two questions were fine, but question 3 involved complex double-entry bookkeeping and was testing for students at this level.