Professor David Malone of the Department of Maths and Statistics and the Hamilton institute at Maynooth University recently featured in an article by The Irish Times Education Editor Carl O'Brien focusing on his work in digitising every Leaving Certificate Maths paper since 1925, the year of the very first Leaving Cert exams.
Professor Malone subsequently featured on the Ray D'Arcy Show on RTE Radio 1, where he discussed the digital collection and some of his research discoveries including how gender attitudes have changed since 1925.
"The technnical 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'.
Another striking discovery was the shortness of the exam papers with most consisting of just one or two pages. Graphs, diagrams and imagery are generally absent from the papers. This compares with today's exam papers which may be 30 or 40 pages long and which include space to answer directly on to the script.
'What's striking is how little has fundamentally changed in the nature of the assessments over much of the past century'.
Read the original article here.
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