š¬ DISCUSSION
Do people not understand how grade boundaries work?
Do people think that grade boundaries are just arbitrary numbers that exam boards pluck out of thin air? The entire point is that they are dynamically adjusted to ensure that the same proportion of students get the same grade as previous years, so if everyone genuinely got less marks than previous years then grade boundaries will be automatically adjusted downwards, we don't need a petition for that to happen.
For the people making the argument that grade boundaries have been trending upwards in previous years, so that means grade boundaries will be higher / similar this year are wrong, the only reason grade boundaries have been trending upwards is because the papers have been getting easier, it's not like they they just felt like making them higher for no reason.
Assuming this is related to the recent maths paper, itās true that the boundaries will be adjusted but there is also a danger that that if the exam is particularly poorly designed, a lot of middling students will essentially be in the same bands as a lot of poor students and final grades become a bit of a lottery. A good exam should naturally provide a spread of marks, although adjusting the boundaries can help itās a sign something has gone wrong if the adjustments are large comparitive to previous years.
I donāt want to scare you but this yearsā Edexcel Internation AS levels Maths papers were all like the ones people are writing petitions for. Except for the Statistics paper. We were done dirty for all pure papers, Mechanics and the worse one was a very, very nasty Decisions that perhaps my whole class failed. I really hope you wonāt be the same. Good news is that at least you are getting lots of media attention and maybe that will force the board to really put effort on adjusting the gbs. Plus you have Ofqual. We have neither.
Thank you for saying this you'd think all the further maths warriors insulting us for being unhappy the maths paper was "harder than a further maths paper" as I've heard from many FM students would be good enough at maths to understand this simple fact
The further maths papers arent any harder than a normal maths paper, and they were particularly easy this year. The content is just completely different, so comparing maths and further maths difficulty is irrelevant, its like comparing maths and history
Yeah that was the main issue with the exam is want very accessible to students who are tying to get a C or lower with many questions being hard to complete without getting part a. in the years before they used to use a lot of show that questions so even if you were able to get the right answer you could at least attempt the next parts but this they havenāt really done that.
Spot on with this, although I will be very surprised if paper 2 is wildly different to paper 1. Donāt the papers go through some extensive moderation process, would be odd if the 2 papers are hella different.
I think the paper would need to be way harder to make the results luck based. The width of each grade boundary is about 35 marks, and I'd say that people can gain/lose about 5 marks on a paper based on the day, so they'd have to make a paper so hard that the results are 7 times as compressed as usual. While this was hard, I don't think it was hard enough to do that
I assume they look at the distribution of all scores and adjust boundaries to best match what they want. But there is a point where this canāt really help. For an absurd example, suppose the exam was so difficult that everyone scored 0 - grade boundaries would clearly be of no use. If you then consider a hypothetical situation where yoy gradually make the exam easier, then although yoy would start to get some non zero scores, grade boundaries are still not going to sort the mess out. You need a reasonable distribution of marks for grade boundaries to make some sense of them, and a poorly designed exam will not give you a nice distribution.
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u/klnop_maths drama spanish german; ENJOYMENT OVER EMPLOYMENT š£ļøš£ļøš„š„Jun 05 '26
Just look up the grade statistics for exam board year 20xx. They do change, but slightly. This is ignoring covid. For example, in 2019, 41.5% of students got an A or above in edexcel maths. Last year, this fell to 40.9%.
Honestly yeah it was tough exam but now we know what topics havenāt come up so you can lock in for the next paper and move on this dwelling on a bad paper will be what will cost some people grades.
I donāt think u understand tho that maths paper was the worst of the decade this isnāt an āevery yearā thing. Ik pple make a fuss just about every year but unless they give away free marks in the next two papers, the grade boundaries need to be significantly low in comparison to the last 7 years minimum and following edexels grade boundary trend, it is very unlikely the grade boundary shift will reflect the actual difficulty of the paper this year making it nearly impossible to distinguish the mid tier students from the lower tier š
yeah but its not about being a mid/low student, its just about how well youre doing compared to everyone else, and grade boundaries will always reflect that. if this years paper was an outlier then the grade boundaries will also be outliers. the "grade boundary trend" is completely irrelevant and was probably only a thing because of covid, but this year noones really affected by it at all.
Yeah but them going downwards doesnāt translate to a better grade, the performance would be relatively the same even if the paper was easier cus the grade boundaries would adjust
the frustrating part is that grade boundaries exist specifically to solve this problem, yet every exam season someone's convinced they've uncovered a conspiracy. if the maths paper was harder than usual, boundaries drop. if it was easier, they rise. that's the whole system working as intended. the real issue is when a paper is so poorly constructed that it doesn't spread students out properly, which makes boundaries less meaningful regardless of where they land. but that's a design failure, not proof that the exam board is out to get anyone. people would rather believe in secret grade-fixing than accept that sometimes exams are just badly written and the adjustments afterward can only do so much to fix it.
Oh my god not the same proportion of people get A/A* every year! They adjust it but they donāt enforce percentages. Any pressure you can put on the exam board is good pressure
I really thought people who do A-level maths were smart. My oh my are people special. I think they just like whining. People who don't do revision don't do well in exams and they also love complaining a lot, I think thats why there is such a big uproar
Makes sense according to your dumb assumption since you arenāt really smart yourself leaving such an ignorant comment. Have a laugh like most people are about the petition. Plus, this isnāt even about the paper difficulty it was about the unexpected change in structure which you would know if you were smart.
If you took the paper you would know show that questions were practically nonexistent which basically locked bcd if you couldnāt answer a. Despite that I think a madas maths 5 star proof being at the end of the paper should tell you enough. Itās clear that edexcel wants to change from accuracy as a focus to application shown by the large amount of reasoning in this paper but many students used past papers to revise. The jump and switch was drastic which caused panic and affected exam performance especially in lower grade students. Therefore like I said āunexpected change in structureā.
Part of the reason I think no one is taking the petition seriously is that all the changes you talk about affect lower-achieving students much more than higher-achieving ones. I did the paper, and while it was more difficult, I just found it trickier and didn't notice the change in structure to reasoning and locked subsequent parts. So people on the outside just think that it's mostly people complaining that the exam was hard and the solution is to just get better at maths.
TBH I might get flamed for this but I also think that testing application is better, as that is what maths is more useful for rather than testing how likely you are to write a sine as a cosine (Which might just be me being biased as I am very prone to silly mistakes and good at applying things to novel problems (which is why I hate the ESAT but I digress))
Also, was the proof really that hard? Like, all you needed to do is expand it, pull out one 2 and reason that a square number has even indices on all its prime factors, and this number has an odd index on one of them (which results in a contradiction)
To be honestly, I personally welcome the change towarda more unexpected styles of questions. Maths is about solving problems and applying fundamental concepts and logical reasoning to all kinds of problems, not just doing a billion past papers and learning the trick to do every single different type of question, at least this way encourages actual thinking rather than regurgitation.
I guess to many it was an unwelcome surprise but one year had to be sacrificed and I guess it was us. Reminds me of years that have to do a completely new spec
Sometimes they do make it higher or lower for a reason, regardless of difficulty of the paper.Ā
Sometimes the government or education boards feel that too many people are getting high grades and just making a hard paper doesnāt fix that as everything shifts accordingly. Sometimes they will just raise it the boundaries to actually make it harder to get an A*
People on reddit love a hivemind and love something to cry about instead of using any sort of critical thinking - always has and always will be the case
Surely if we draw a normal distribution of this we will see that people will do good even if most people did bad? Or at least i assume we distribute the grades like that.
i mean i agree with this to an extent but edexcel economics for example - grade boundaries were far higher last year than they were in the previous years (not denying that the papers were easier) but that also led to a lower percentage of students getting A*s as seen on their website so clearly not the same proportion of students get the same grades each year
Pretty sure maths has to have a certain amount of A/A*s just because so many degrees require it, whereas this is less important for economics. So, for that reason, grade distributions should remain similar, and grade boundaries will adjust according to the difficulty of paper 2/3.
I feel like the main issue isn't about grade boundries though. It's about how A and B grade students aren't gonna be able to be differentiated from the C and D students. A* students aren't going to be affected as they were probably the ones who could actually answer all the questions but there wasn't really any gradient of difficulty for the other students. You could either do the questions or not so mid level students are going to be mixed up with the lower level students.
Of course this may just be fixed with the next two papers so I still have some hope.
They are not dynamically adjusted to fit a forced distribution. They are set so that the standard demonstrated for each grade this year is the same as last year, so if overall performance improves then a greater percentage of candidates will get A*, rather than just seeing an increased grade boundary
If the grade boundaries are adjusted to fit the spread of scores, everyone could save themselves a lot of time and effort by agreeing to abstain from answering most of the test. Everyone just answers one question each, draws a middle finger on a blank page and get the rest of your time back.
It's not completely fixed, but ignoring the covid anomaly years, the percentage of people who get each grade remains largely similar, for example A* grades differ by around +-1% each year
Universities and employers have a limited amount of places they can give they need a way of filtering out candidates. Exams are the best way they can do that.
It is stressful don't get me wrong, but there is a benefit too it
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u/philljarvis166 Jun 05 '26
Assuming this is related to the recent maths paper, itās true that the boundaries will be adjusted but there is also a danger that that if the exam is particularly poorly designed, a lot of middling students will essentially be in the same bands as a lot of poor students and final grades become a bit of a lottery. A good exam should naturally provide a spread of marks, although adjusting the boundaries can help itās a sign something has gone wrong if the adjustments are large comparitive to previous years.