Edexcel maths A level today

[Maray1967]

Anyone else’s 18 year old had a bad time with Edexcel Maths today?

Mine says it was horrifically hard. I’ve said all the usual stuff about trying not to dwell on it and focusing on the next exam, but it might be helpful if he’s not alone!! He didn’t hang around long after school but says it looked like everyone thought it was hard.

Adults (presumably experienced maths teachers) on here saying they thought it was fine, why are you comparing your pre- prepped experience sitting in your nice calm environment, with years of maths under your belt, to a 17/18 year old turning over that paper in a silent exam hall with their future progression dependant on it? Do you think that’s a helpful comparison?

2025
Petition · EDEXCEL A LEVEL MATHS PAPER 2 2025 SCANDAL - United Kingdom · Change.org

2024
AQA maths a level | Mumsnet

2023
REQUEST TO EVERYONE WHO TOOK THE PURE MATHS 9709 PAPER 12 ON MAY 2023 : r/alevel

A recurring theme.

Link 1 has 2,300 signatures- hardly on the same scale
link 2 is a one-page thread, which mostly seems to be about one person’s concerns
link 3 doesn’t work

Ummmm experience. And the fact that my students and many others did not think is was horrendous.

Years ago, AQA had a horrendously difficult P3 paper. Much harder than any that had gone before.
guess what? Nothing happened, the grade boundaries were lowered and life went on.

This paper from Wednesday really is. It as bad as some are making out.

….. really is not as bad as many are making out.

We are not doing that. I am a maths teacher. We are using our experience of teaching students maths and seeing them get through A-level exams to draw conclusions. It is of course acceptable to us to do this.

I prefer this paper to the 2025 papers, which were easy enough to be a test partially of accuracy. This year’s paper 1 tests mathematical knowledge and ability more, so will be more discerning.

And my point stands, your experience is not their experience. Your cohort does not reflect everyone in the 75000 students who sat it. My son sat it, he’s a grammar school and 150 kids in the year sit maths and about 50% of them take further maths. He has friends going to do maths and engineering degrees at top unis. They all found it hard because of the nature of the paper, not because they couldn’t do maths. The FM students said it was worse than the FM papers they had sat. Something is wrong in the system for that to happen. My son has moved on, hopefully he’ll still get a reasonable grade, that doesn’t mean the paper wasn’t problematic.

I am not convinced that the boundaries will move closer together downwards. Last year they moved closer together upwards, I think there will be some unwinding of that.

You are doing that. You’re standing outside of the problem looking in through the lens of experience!

In some ways students are the least able to tell if a paper is unduly hard / easy. They are too close. I would think maths teachers are well placed.

If some questions are worded differently to previous papers that just makes it a test of flexibility of ability to apply maths students know, which is something that probably should be tested to some extent at A level.

Like Hannah's sweets from GCSE 2015. There wasn't any extra hard maths just unusually presented.

Sure, OK. 🙃

I don’t get what you are saying. Are you saying that maths teachers should not comment on the difficulty of maths papers or the extent to which they are fair? And that we shouldn’t do that because we have perspective?! Of course we can comment on this! Of course we have insight! None of us are pretending that we don’t have perspective. We all know that we don’t have the “immediacy” of our students. My students have literally been coming into my classroom and emailing me to ask exactly what I think! They want to know!

I teach people exactly like your son. I teach in a grammar school just like the one you describe. I probably teach your son :) I still don’t think that the exam was unfair.

My sons an average B grade student. He says the simple issue is the paper was nothing like the 2023-2025 papers and was probably harder than the 2019 Paper which Edexcel suggested they were moving away from.

If the board hadn't said what they said previously then I suspect more students would have practiced more difficult papers.

The difference between grade boundaries for 2019 and 2025 is about 20%.

My son doesn't think there would have been much of an issue if students hadn't been given the impression the paper would be similar to 2023-2025.

He though isn't that bothered about it and seems to have found the difficulty more amusing than upsetting.

Maths teachers - do you have any thoughts on the number of questions for which part (a) had to be answered to attempt the following parts? I haven't seen the paper, but I think it was at least 3 or 4 questions. Do you think that was fine?

My son sat this exam, and he recognised and could have done the later parts of questions but ended up leaving them unanswered because he couldn't complete part (a). Maybe with hindsight he needed strategies such as putting in any value to continue and get some method marks, but in the moment under time pressure he just kept trying to crack any part (a) so that he could continue. It wasn't a situation he had planned for, as the past papers were not structured this way.

I think this report from Pearson/Edexcel, particularly section 2 about restart opportunities, describes the exact opposite of what happened in this paper:
https://qualifications.pearson.com/content/dam/pdf/A%20Level/Mathematics/2017/Teaching%20and%20learning%20materials/1825208912-alevelmaths-review-of-questionpaperimprovements-2025.pdf

You don't think experienced maths teachers can comment on whether a paper was a 'war crime' or not?

If that is the case something has gone badly wrong with A level maths teaching in this country if so many students who achieved 8/9 in GCSE and A/A* in mocks struggled so much.

I don't teach Edexcel, but when I looked at it there was one question where I did think if they couldn't do part a) they had zero chance of part b) because they were given nothing, but then I looked at the 2025 paper and there was a nearly identical question which they'd have done in their mocks so shouldn't have had any issues with.

There was an issue with the 'show that' questions in that some of them didn't give the precise answer needed for the next part, but rather with a constant that needed to be worked out (e.g. show that the answer is ksinx where k is to be determined). They could have made up a value for k and then continued with part b) but obviously that's exam technique rather than maths knowledge. Having had a glance at some previous papers this has happened before so they could have been prepped for it, but not on as many questions on the same paper.

I've seen comments elsewhere saying that something like 30 marks (or more) were in questions with this structure. Is that so?

Were all of them amenable to putting in an arbitrary numerical value for the purpose of doing the next part and getting some marks for method? Or were any more complex so that this strategy wouldn't have worked?

How lucky your students are!

Edit: I began by quoting post @badger2005’s post at 23:35 yesterday
My dd found it v hard too! She wrote up a question for us (DH and me) to try...
A2 + B2 = C2
Prove (by contradiction) that it can't be the case that both A and B are odd numbers....
(Hope fellow maths fans enjoy...!).

I’ve seen this question now.

The solution was set up by giving their first line of ‘a student’s’ proof, (= the first line of a classic method for this problem) so it was possible to continue with the question even if you didn’t know a general expression for an odd number.

It was also the last question on the paper, and only worth 4 marks.

It’s a shame if students ran out of time and didn’t get to that one, as it was relatively accessible - in my opinion.

I’m not convinced something has badly gone wrong with teaching. The paper was just more difficult than previous years, so people found it harder. That doesn’t mean something has gone wrong with teaching.

I’ve also seen this question too. They also specifically told you that you could rely, without proof, on the fact that if c squared is even then c is even, which is a massive hint on how to structure the proof.

Yes, @badger2005 included that in the original post but I failed to use the “Quote” button correctly when attempting to reply to it, so had to do a quick c/p edit which didn’t include the whole thing.

A student who couldn’t do the whole question, or who had forgotten what a proof by contradiction was, could possibly get some marks at the start of their solution.

However, a student who had memorised a different proof for this which started in another way wouldn’t have just been able to regurgitate it.

My DS got a 9 in GCSE and As in mocks but could not do entire sections of this paper.

If I set uni exam papers which first class students could not attempt properly, the external examiner would be asking questions.