Did you walk away from the maths portion of the Diploma of Secondary Education (DSE) exam thinking it felt especially tough this year? You’re not alone; Paper 2 of the exam was “quite hard and time-consuming”, said maths tutor Dick Hui from King’s Glory Education, who also took the assessment.
A total of 51,467 students sat this year’s maths exam on Monday. The results are scheduled to be released on July 16.
Time-consuming questions
Hui said this year’s exam was harder than last year’s and contained a lot of “hidden information”, including right angles and a “strong sense” to figure out answers by drawing things out. He added that coordinate geometry played an important role, while “3D Trigonometry unexpectedly disappears after Paper 1, [though it was] one of the hardest problems in past papers.”
According to Hui, some of the most difficult questions on the exam included Questions 18 and 19 on Paper 1, as they were “quite time-consuming and required a thorough understanding of the centres of triangles”.
Former DSE top scorer publishes book of tips for tackling the Chinese paper
The tutor believed that the most challenging problems on Paper 2 were Question 23, which was about trigonometry and similar triangles; Question 24, about polar coordinates, a topic that Hui said would be cut in next year’s exam; and Question 26, about the equation of a straight line.
Hui posted all the answers to Paper 2 on social media after the exam ended. The answers to the hardest questions were:
-
Question 23: C
-
Question 24: C
-
Question 26: B
Hui said good time management skills were necessary for this exam, as candidates likely had to “draw and fine-tune figures for every question to find out hidden relationships.”
“I believe many students did not have enough time to complete all the questions, as some required trickier methods to do faster,” he said.
Tough slog for students
DSE candidates also found the exam to be quite tricky this year.
Wilson Tang, a student at SKH St Mary’s Church Mok Hing Yiu College, said that both papers were “very hard” and felt it may have been the most difficult DSE maths exam ever.
“My classmates also expressed a disappointed feeling after the exam,” Wilson said.
The 17-year-old added that he thought the cut-offs this year would be “pretty low” due to the test’s difficulty and that he didn’t prepare adequately for the tough questions.
Shahzad Ahmed, 18, agreed that Paper 1 and Paper 2 “were harder than expected”.
“Paper 2’s difficulty went up in my opinion,” said Ahmed, who attends Kiangsu-Chekiang College.
“The reason for Paper 1 being harder than expected is because, in Part B, the difficulty jumps up suddenly from Question 17 onwards. For Paper 2, a lot of the questions that could save time in the previous years had changed this year,” he explained.
Should DSE candidates be able to choose their core subjects for the exams?
Ahmed and Wilson said they both struggled with time management throughout the exam.
Wong Fut Nam College student Evan Ho’s strategy was to complete the easy and medium-difficulty questions first instead of spending a lot of time on the harder questions.
While the 18-year-old student said he did his best, he was not sure he would “safely” achieve the result he was aiming for.
“The 2025 maths DSE was more challenging than I expected, especially Paper 2’s multiple choice,” he said, adding that it may have felt extra challenging because of the relative ease of last year’s paper. “Up to now, the maths exam is the most challenging subject I have confronted.”
