Hard?! It wasn't very hard in my opinion lol. I was actually surprised that there was an article saying how the exam was too hard...lol
However, I would have to say that a lot of the questions were very "different" to previous years so I guess that's why not many people found it easy especially if they basically live off past paper questions since many of the questions may have seemed so unfamiliar to a lot of people.
For me, the projectile motion question in Question 6 was the only one that stumped me. I was kicking myself when we discussed the solutions because it turned out to be so easy to do, it's just a matter of getting the right starting point (e.g. completely forgot that I could have done dL²/dx for 6(a)(ii) rather than dL/dx, even though we actually covered this trick at school)....lol
Also, an interesting thing I noticed was that the very first question 1(a) for the 2006 paper was almost identical to the very first question for the 2005 paper and the solution to both was exactly the same. The funny thing was that in 2005 it was worth 1 mark, whereas in 2006 the same question was worth 2 marks!
I'm guessing that all this was because someone new was in charge of the exam committee for Mathematics Extension 1 2006, so expect similar style exams in years to come....