Your GCSE Maths Exam Paper: its Hidden Secrets

With our latest algebra course about to begin, we thought we’d share some of the context behind why it’s important from an exam grade perspective (although we feel that there are other more pressing motives) to develop algebraic skills. Getting more comfortable with algebra opens up the door to exam questions targeted at the higher grades and means that you can access much more of the exam paper. This in turn boosts your grade potential!

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The Design of Maths Exam Papers

Ofqual [1] sets specific rules about how Maths exam papers should be designed, and it’s a complicated affair!

First, there are the grades available on both the foundation and higher tier papers. The highest grade in the foundation tier is a 5, and the overlapping grades available in both tiers are 3, 4 and 5. Standards must be consistent across the two tiers. To this end, exam papers contain three groups of questions: ‘common’ questions are exactly the same in both tiers; ‘similar’ questions test the same content but use a different wording or question structure; and ‘non-common’ questions are the more difficult questions in the higher tier paper and the easier questions in the foundation tier.

It's useful to first understand the overlap between foundation and higher tier papers. Let’s look, for example, at the Edexcel IGCSE 2022 papers where we see that questions 17-28 in paper 2F are repeated in paper 2H as questions 1-12. That's a 40/200 mark overlap (20%) between the two tiers. For the higher tier papers that year, the pass mark was 17.5%. This is typical, and means that you can get a grade 4 on the higher papers by answering nothing but foundation paper questions! Yes, they are the harder foundation questions, but it’s worth knowing all the same…

As well as those cross-tier criteria, Ofqual also sets specific rules about how each paper should itself be designed. Higher tier papers must strike a balance between testing the content aimed at grade 4 and 5 students, and yet still provide challenging questions on the grade 9 content. Similarly, foundation tier papers must present questions that are accessible to each of the lower grades. The rules state that:

• In a higher tier paper, half of the marks should be targeted at grades 4, 5 and 6, while the other half of the marks should be targeted at grades 7, 8 and 9.

• In a foundation tier paper, half of the marks should be targeted at grades 1, 2 and the bottom of grade 3, while the other half of the marks should be targeted at the top of grade 3, grade 4, and grade 5.

Targeting questions is obviously a tricky affair, but the exam boards are required to be consistent in this matter and they all have multiple concurrent approaches to ensure that they are.

The required breadth of content on higher papers means that only about a sixth of the marks on those papers are designed for students working at grade 4. It is in this context that the grade boundary for a grade 4 on the higher tier papers is typically 19% of the maximum mark. And while this is a consequence of having to provide sufficient challenge across the ability range, it should not detract from the fact that very many students only ever grasp about a fifth of their GCSE Maths syllabus!

1. The Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual) regulates qualifications, examinations and assessments in England.