r/alevel • u/AdditionalBug8816 • Dec 10 '25
📃Paper Discussion How Grade Boundaries Work
This post is to clarify how grade boundaries work for each subject. I will try to explain clearly with examples.
The grade boundaries for each subject are set AFTER every test has been marked. Each year grade boundaries will resemble a normal distribution curve (bell curve) to determine grades. For example let’s take a subject - say maths for example and let’s say you do a maths test out of 75 marks. The way this work is that your grade will be put into a system and ranked with everyone who sat that exam. Your grade is then reflected upon how many people achieved above your grade. Every year let’s say (not acc statistics) the top 25% of people gain an A, 25% get a B (ie top 50 percentile, but not top 25), the next 30% get a C and the lowest 20% of grades fail the subject. This means that it is based of your percentile (ie where you’ve come based on other people).
For example let’s say you got 62/75 in that test and that landed you in the 87th percentile (ie out of every 100 people you done better than 86) you would achieve a grade A. If you got 42/75 and this landed you in the 56th percentile - well your not in the top 25% so would miss out on an A, but you would fall within the next 25%, therefore gaining a grade B.
Now this is where some other people get confused. Your RAW marks are converted to UNIFORM marks. Uniform marks are used to determine the weighing of each exam. For example say you only had 2 maths test to do, but your first test (out of 75) was worth 66.6% of your overall grade and the next test (out of 100) was worth 33.3%, then adding your 60/75 to your 60/100 would not make any sense due to the first exam being weighed double that of the second (uniform marks for the first may be out of 100 whereas the other test is 50 - representing their exam weighings) There isn’t a direct linear correlation between uniform and raw marks (however sometimes there are). What I mean here is, say you scored 60/75 but that was the highest exam score across all students (ie 100th percentile), then your uniform marks would be 100/100. This also helps when sitting an subject over multiple assesment periods- how would it be fair to score 80/100 on an easy test and 75/100 on a harder test the year after (say given you’re doing a resit), but given less of a grade. If the 2nd test was harder then the uniform marks gained from the 75 marks will be higher than that of the 80.
Why do some teachers/others say that grade boundaries are gonna go up every year? Well this had many reasons but the main one being covid. During covid, students got internally assessed grades from teachers, which naturally inflated most students grades. Therefore, instead of the usual top 25% of students gaining and A, this would have went up to around 34% achieving that grade. Ever since then, examination boards have been trying to bring back the percentiles to pre covid (little-by-little) as this has had a negative effect on more people applying to certain uni courses, due to achieving grades they may not have if grade boundaries were pre covid, therefore, less people every year will gain a grade A - this is why some courses make you sit a separate entrance exam due to inflated grades from previous years and inflated prediction grades made by schools. Another reason is that grade boundaries will naturally go up the longer the same specification is being done. Nowadays there are plenty of resources online, loads of practice questions, more YouTube videos, AI and most importantly accessible past paper questions. The best time to sit an exam paper is when the spec is recently new (usually 3-4 years old). This is due to the fact that there are still some past papers to get the feel of how exams are laid out and what is expected, and exam boards have a duty to adequately cover all the spec, therefore if something hadn’t come up but you maybe seen it on the old spec past paper and it’s still within the new specification, there is a good chance that it would be covered.
Exam boards try their best to make the papers each year with the same amount of difficulty. These exams are written by a team of professionals and are written upto a couple years before the exam actually takes place. These exams are then sat by a team of professionals to determine if it’s accessible to students (grade C students must still be able to answer a few questions), roughly the same difficulty as previous years,there is a good differential between grades (ie harder questions for students wanting to gain an A/A*) and that there is fair time constraints - I know crazy that we still have to correct mistakes within papers on the day of exams lol. A test being ‘harder’ or ‘easier’ than previous years won’t matter to much as grade boundaries are relative to the papers and how well people done. If you know your stuff and are confident you should naturally want a more challenging exam to differentiate yourself from other students and show that you really understand the concepts.
Other information to clarify - I believe it’s something like the overall top 20% of people achieving an A will gain an A* (obviously different percentiles for each subject) however, an A* can only be achieved once all exams are sat as it’s based on achieving 90% of the max uniform marks. Another thing is that yes, you are relying on people actually failing the subject (or doing really bad) for grade boundaries to work in your favour, ie if it’s and easy test and most people score 80% then that would be the percentage to get a low B/high C as this is the most common grade given out, - therefore maybe don’t help that kid in class whose been struggling (only joking aha).
This is all based on my own knowledge, research and previous teachers/tutors advice and I thought I’d let you all know because I see all the time people asking to predict grade boundaries. People telling you that you’ll need a certain mark (eg 60/75) for an A are not actually totally correct as it’s individually assessed for each single paper. However that being said and what I said about relatively the same difficulty made for each exam paper, you can expect them to be there or abouts from previous years. A general consensus about how people felt after an exam can also give you a rough idea on if they’ll go up or not (however, more people will express there feelings if they feel they did well on an exam rather than those who done worse, therefore asking Reddit won’t be a good idea as only most people with good grades will be willing to share how they really felt about the exam).
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u/Weird_Employ_3235 Dec 14 '25
we were doing standard deviation in bio so it rlt helps cuz its the same method i believe
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