80% for a grade 9 on Cambridge iGCSE Maths

[noblegiraffe]

Grade boundaries have been released for one of the first 9-1 maths exams.

I have no idea how the iGCSE paper compares to other exam boards, but their grade 9 threshold % is actually lower than their A* percentage from last year.

I'm slightly horrified by the foundation grade boundaries so for these I'm going to assume that the paper was very different to Edexcel.

Still, it seems that getting a 9 might not require as high marks as people were thinking.

Thanks for sharing.

It all depends on the distribution curve of marks for all candidates though.

If only 2% (or whatever) of candidates reached the mark, then it's harder to attain than the same mark on a paper that 6% reached (about 6.5% of 2016 GCSEs were A*)

Well, it's GCSE level maths; there's a limit to how hard it can be to get 80% or more. Also, people have now seen the paper (but not the mark scheme? still, again, a perfect answer will get full marks and teachers know what one is). So I bet many children, teachers and parents are now breathing a sigh of relief because they did the whole paper confidently and couldn't possibly have got less than that boundary.

On the negative side, I was pretty horrified by that - can it really be the case that a single figure percentage of entrants will do that well? I predict it'll be very, very lumpy in that case, with lots of instances of entire top sets or even entire cohorts at certain schools getting 9s. That'll be fun, particularly if the other boards are similar.

Thank you giraffe
Very interesting- particularly the 5 and 4 information. I don't think this will necessarily correlate to the 'mainstream' GCSE maths closely for equivalent grade boundaries, particularly at the bottom end where I would expect much more clumping (though maybe I'm just kidding myself as our weaker students found the papers just too hard and I thought it would be hard to separate them out), I'd appreciate your thoughts on the matter.

It's going to be fascinating (if awful) to have a look at the normal gcse boundaries.

My lot are doomed if the Edexcel foundation boundaries come out that high - we were internally working on about 50% (120 marks) being a 4 when calculating our passes so 140 would be a disaster. I wish I could see the iGCSE paper for comparison of difficulty! It's not unusual for grade boundaries to be very different between exam boards though, old OCR foundation was about 55% for a C where to get a C on Edexcel you needed over 70%.

Universally - the grade boundaries for foundation will be pegged for a 1 and a 4, to the proportion getting a G and a C last year. The 2 and the 3 will then be put at even intervals between those points, regardless of the distribution of pupils. Where the 5 will go is anyone's guess, as they need it to be comparable to the Higher 5.

27% to 'standard' pass maths GCSE on Higher for this board. What would the Daily Mail make of that I wonder? It shows the papers actually are harder than last year for a start.

Have the iGCSE maths papers been changed to correspond to the new GCSE maths syllabus? Or is it the previous, easier syllabus but grade given in numbers not letters?

When I looked (admittedly a few years ago now) Cambridge IGCSE seemed as hard as any GCSE syllabus I could find, while Edexcel IGCSE seemed a lot easier.

Thanks relaxitllbeok the GCSE syllabi have been revised so comparison needs to be with the current exams taken in June, that's why I was wondering if the iGCSEs have also been revised so they are still comparable.

ah sorry - you meant easier as in old syllabus easier than new one, and I read it as IGCSE easier than GCSE (which I had the impression was maybe true for one IGCSE but not the other).

The Cambridge 0626 syllabus noble's post refers to is new this year, and at a glance, doesn't look easier than the first current GCSE syllabus I google up (AQA's 8300) - I spotted a few things in the IGCSE but not the GCSE, but nothing the other way round. Caveat: I only glanced and I don't have experience of weak students at this level so maybe there is something that makes the new IGCSE easier than the new GCSE and I just don't recognise it.

www.cie.org.uk/programmes-and-qualifications/cambridge-igcse-mathematics-9-1-ukonly-0626/

www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/mathematics/gcse/mathematics-8300

Thankyou, that's very helpful, I will check out the links

The iGCSE is accredited by Ofqual but doesn't count in the league tables so I can't imagine they had a huge number of takers in the UK - private schools who wanted to do 9-1 instead of A*-G but not actual GCSE.

Private school kids don't usually do SATs so god knows how they decided the boundaries for this.

Hi Noble. I hope you're having a nice summer. I scanned the CIE igcse papers. There are 6 papers called components. Papers 1,3 and 5 are essentially Foundation. Papers 2,4 and 6 are Higher. Comparing specimen papers from 9-1 Ed Excel Higher vs CIE Igcse Higher, I thought EDExcel was slightly harder.

Ps, I gave a good nugget for you. I spoke with maths lead at Ed Excel. He stated Ed Excel igcse Sowc B are good practise for about 90% of content fir Ed Excel 9-1 gcse. Lots of papers to practise from.

Apologies for typos

this are pretty similar to the boundaries that dd's school chose for their year 11 mocks (they do AQA) - for the higher paper anyway. Think dd got 53% & they said that was a solid 6.

Yes, the higher boundaries look reasonable, foundation look 😱

We'll see!

Is there a way of ironing that out tiggy?

I didn't think it was possible under the old system, which was why there were occasionally odd discrepancies I.e. the fiasco with the English coursework a few years ago and possibly between modular and linear maths papers.

How likely is it that these boundaries will be similar to the Edexcel GCSE boundaries?

They seem quite low at the upper end considering it is out of 240.

Ds has just left a selective private school that does igcse.

The letter we got about maths sets stated that all students in the school would be entered for the higher paper. In a meeting just before he left we were told that for the first time next year the school were introducing a foundation paper in response to the new GCSE's. (this years cohort did A-C but next years will do 9-1) so it's entirely possible that what tiggy said has happened.

I hope so too tiggy. It was just that the newspapers are saying that only a few hundred students will get the top grade so I thought it would be higher than 191 out of 240.

Have any maths teachers been given any feedback about roughly where grade boundaries might lie or is it a complete unknown?

Complete unknown. School's have done their own calculations based on mock scores and so on, but from discussions on here have come up with pretty different values. Certain assumptions have needed to be made to come up with grade boundaries within schools, and as we have been told by Ofqual to expect more volatility than usual in results this year, those assumptions may not be valid.