How are A Level grade boundaries set?

[hellogym]

My understanding was that they mark everyone's paper, rank them in order of score, then give the top x% an A*, the next y% an A, the next z% a B, etc. Yes?

I can see that working ok for exams with large cohorts, representative of the full spectrum of Year 13 ability. But what about in niche cohorts with small numbers?

For Further Maths, my DC has chosen an optional module that seems to be relatively niche - they have been told by their teacher that only around 40 students in the whole country did the paper last year. They were all likely to have a specific interest in the subject, and probably in selective schools that could offer all of the options. So how will the grade boundaries work in this case? Will they sense-check the results against the other Further Maths modules and adjust for the cohort profile? (Ironically, it is a Further Statistics paper, so they should get it right. 😶

Grade boundaries only apply across the whole qualification, or at least they do in Music. The exam boards add up the scores for all 3 components and grade boundaries are calculated on them. They then work backwards to give them for the individual components. So if FM is the same, this particular paper shouldn't make a massive difference as they will look at all the papers together.

Thanks. That's reassuring. He is sitting 4 papers for Further Maths, rather than 3, so that should help (he did have the opportunity to sit 5 but decided not too).

(Four papers is the minimum for Edexcel - 2 core modules and 2 options)

I don't know what they do, but it would be easy enough, for each optional paper, to look at the candidates' scores on the core papers, and use that to determine any scaling necessary to get a similar distribution on the optional paper. If anyone's going to get it right, it's the mathematicians.

It's calculated over the whole world (anyone taking that exam). It's isn't done on a school by school basis

I don't think that's correct. There is a much more complicated mathematical model than that depending on the overall mark distribution obtained by all the candidates. The relative difficulty of the exam should be taken into account in setting the grade boundaries.

I didn't say it was by school. I said in the country, but, to clarify, only around 40 in the whole world chose that option, apparently.

The relative difficulty of the exam should be taken into account in setting the grade boundaries.

They can't tell how difficult an exam is until it has been sat and the results are in. They only know it's a more difficult paper if students did worse on it than expected.

They'll look at samples of work and compare it to work from previous years' sittings to try to make the grades comparable. They'll also look at GCSE grade profile to see what sorts of results those students should be getting (e.g. further maths kids are generally high fliers who would be expecting top grades so they won't grade on the same curve as for A-level).

Thanks Noble. I found some info on total number of candidates for each subject here: qualifications.pearson.com/en/support/support-topics/results-certification/grade-statistics.html?Qualification-Family=A-Level

In 2019 (last normal year) there were 6234 students in the world who sat Edexcel Further Maths A Level and 24% of them got an A Star.

Unfortunately, it doesn't break them down into which optional papers they sat. But as there are 4 options, and most schools seem to do Further Pure 2 or Further Mechanics 2, I can easily believe that only a few dozen candidates did Further Stats 2.

They'll also look at GCSE grade profile to see what sorts of results those students should be getting

That will be difficult this year because they got Centre Assessed Grades for the 2020 GCSEs.

Good point, although it's generally not v helpful for further maths anyway as a lot of schools require an 8 to sit it. However, the A-level grades are supposed to be higher this year than in 2019 so looking at higher than usual GCSE results then applying the usual progression would probably be a reasonable check.

How does that work, my daughter got a selection of 4-7 for GCSES, she had a accident and missed mocks (hospital), it was all a mess. She is predicated A for A-Level and is top of her class, are you suggesting the GCSE results will drag her grades down??

*As x 3

No. They do not look at an individual's GCSE result to work out their A-level result. We are talking about on a cohort level when deciding grade boundaries. I.e. is this cohort brighter than in previous years.

Ah thank you.

No , it's a lot more sophisticated than x% get A*. A lot of work is done to standardise between, sittings, exam boards, and other subjects