It Was All Much Harder When I Was Young: Science and the Leaving Cert

Former students often declare that the Leaving Cert was much harder in the past, but what were the exams actually like?
 
Sparked into action by a Twitter-based claim that someone had studied differentiation and complex numbers for Inter Cert mathematics in the 1980s (they hadn't!), the Mathematics Department in Maynooth University has been collecting Leaving Cert and Junior Cert exams to investigate the issue.  

Dr David Malone and Hazel Murray will review many of the STEM exam papers from 1925 to present day. Why 1925? Well, that's the first year the Leaving Cert and Inter Cert were examined by the then recently-formed Department of Education.