For parents · Primary & PSLE math
Is PSLE maths getting harder? We counted.
"The PSLE keeps getting harder, doesn't it?" It is the most common worry I hear from parents, so rather than guess, we sat down and counted. The answer is gentler than the rumour.
Mrs Eileen Toh
Founder & Curriculum Architect · ex-MOE · 5 min read · Updated 22 Jun 2026
If you spend any time in parent chat groups, you will have read it a dozen times: the PSLE maths paper is getting harder every year, this batch has it worse than the last, the bar keeps rising. I understand exactly why the worry spreads. It is said with real feeling, usually by a parent who has just watched their child come out of a paper looking shaken. And once a fear like that is repeated often enough, it starts to feel like a fact.
So we did the unglamorous thing. We took the past papers, we read every question, and we counted. I would rather hand you the count than add another voice to the rumour, because the truth here is both more accurate and, I think, kinder.
What we actually did
We tagged 709 PSLE questions across fourteen years of papers and rated each one for difficulty on a 5-point scale. Of those, 664 come from the fourteen papers actually sat between 2012 and 2025; the other 45 are the MOE Specimen paper, which we keep reported separately so it never quietly inflates the real-paper figures. Then we did the boring, honest part: we counted, year by year, what the difficulty actually looked like.
This matters because "harder" is a feeling, and feelings do not sort themselves into numbers on their own. Once every question has a difficulty rating, you can ask the question properly: has the average really climbed, or has it held steady?
the narrow band the whole-paper difficulty average has stayed in, every year, 2012 to 2025
PSLE questions we tagged and rated for difficulty across fourteen years
when the hardest tail of questions grew, before easing again in 2024 and 2025
The whole-paper average has barely moved
Here is the headline, said plainly: across all fourteen years, the average difficulty of the whole paper sits in a narrow band of roughly 2.4 to 2.7 on our 5-point scale. Not climbing steadily. Not running away from the children. Sitting, year after year, in much the same place.
And if anything, the most recent papers sit at the calmer end of that band. By our rating, 2024 came in at about 2.38 and 2025 at about 2.4. So the story that the paper is relentlessly toughening, with the very latest cohorts facing the hardest version yet, simply is not what the count shows.
So why does it feel harder?
Because something did move, just not the average. What shifted is the demanding tail: the share of the very hardest questions on the paper. That share grew from roughly 2019 to 2023, then eased back again in 2024 and 2025.
That tail is the part everyone remembers. A child can be comfortable with most of a paper and still walk out rattled by the two or three questions that bit hardest, and those are the questions that get screenshotted and passed around the chat groups. So the paper as a whole holds steady, while the part we talk about most can swing. Both things are true at once, and only the count lets you see them separately.
The honest, responsible answer
The paper is not simply getting harder year on year. That is what fourteen years of counting says. Frightening parents about an ever-harder exam is neither true nor kind, and I will not do it, because a worried parent makes a worried child, and a worried child does not check their working or read the question twice.
I should be equally honest about the limits of this. This is an analysis of past papers, not a forecast of the next one. We cannot tell you what the 2026 paper will hold, and you should be wary of anyone who claims they can. What the count gives you is calm, evidence-based perspective, so that you can prepare your child steadily instead of anxiously. If you would like the full count, with the year-by-year chart, it lives in our pillar guide on the most-tested PSLE math topics.