Leaving Cert Maths: There was an angry reaction from teachers and students to yesterday's difficult higher level Maths exam, amid calls for one of the sections to be dropped from the marking scheme for the exam.

Last year, of the 53,000 students sitting the exam, only 9,500 opted to take the higher level paper.

But according to Jim Healy, a teacher at Terenure College in Dublin and the subject representative for skoool.ie, yesterday's paper would have done little to persuade students to tackle higher level maths.

"Overall, this was much harder than it has been for the last number of years ... a lot of students I spoke to were disappointed and some of them were upset. It was certainly a shock to the system for a lot of them," he said. "We are trying to encourage more people to take this subject. It has been easier in recent years, but this kind of thing doesn't help."

Some of the questions were straightforward enough, with "tricky bits". But Mr Healy said other sections of the paper were "heavily complained about." He also expressed the hope that the marking scheme for one section of question seven, on the Newton-Raphson method, would be "rejigged" to ensure it is not marked too heavily. However, other teachers who contacted The Irish Times suggested this question should be discounted entirely, as it was unclear and ill-thought-out.

Also commenting on the exam, Eileen Scanlon, a teacher at Salerno Secondary School in Galway and the ASTI subject representative, said she believed repeat students may have benefitted from having studied the old Junior Certificate syllabus.

This was because some of the questions which appeared included material which is not on the new Junior Certificate syllabus studied by many first-time students. "The repeat students were happy and those who took three years to do the Leaving Certificate were happy, but kids doing the Leaving Certificate for the first time would have been very pressed to do well on that paper," she said.

But Thomas O'Connor, a teacher at St Paul's Community College in Waterford and the TUI subject representative, suggested the paper appeared more challenging than it actually was, with students finding once they attempted questions they were in fact quite "doable."

He said yesterday's paper was "very much on the pattern of previous years. "I can see where there are bits and pieces that might look a bit off-putting, but I think students will find they have performed reasonably well," he said.

Yesterday's ordinary level paper might have presented students with real challenges in some places, but was in general deemed to be a fair examination of their abilities. According to TUI subject representative Thomas O'Connor, parts A and B of the questions were straightforward. However part C in quite a few of the questions was "demanding enough."

"I would have said that at this level a lot of students have difficulty, and I suppose a weaker student would have come out having experienced difficulty," he said. "But I don't think it was any more demanding than in previous years."

Jim Healy of skoool.ie agreed that the exam had "one or two awkward places." But overall, he said it was quite a fair paper. "I would say well done to the examiners, they have created a paper which managed to reward those students making the effort."