question for A-level maths teachers

[MapleSyrupWaffles]

If you teach at a college where you've had students come from different secondary schools who do different boards (or if you have taught/marked mutliple boards), do you find that any particular board is better preparation for A-level?

I realise that any difference is going to be vastly overshadowed by individual differences between pupils, and between the schools that have prepared them, but even so, do you get any sense of one being more useful than others? They generally cover the same content, but there are some subtle differences between presentation, format, style of questions etc.

In short, if you had a totally open choice of GCSE boards, eg. for a home schooled student, which would you choose? Much of the discussion online is about which is easier to pass, rather than which is more interesting, more well written/organised, or in any other way 'better' for the higher end.

...interesting question, I'd like to know too!

It doesn’t make much difference - the content they cover at GCSE and the style of exams for maths is very similar. Plus - there are different exam boards for A-level which also cover the same content but with slightly different styles of questions.

I would probably tell people to go for edexcel - but that might just be because I am most familiar with it.

With my new year 12s this year I basically don’t care what exam board they did. I am much more interested in how good their algebra is.

thanks, that's useful. A family friend is going to have to choose at some point, and my advice so far was that I probably wouldn't choose iGCSE as fewer resources around, and also I find the style of questions on the papers a bit odd because they're all with calculators, and so they sometimes have to contort the questions a bit to test some skill without it just being easy to do on a calculator. But beyond that, the regular GCSE boards are all fairly similar, and it is probably easier to choose based on the examination centre (which is likely to be either AQA or Edexcel, but I expect they could find an OCR centre if they tried). My experience with the other boards has been mainly with the lower levels and pupils trying to pass, which is a different kettle of fish.

Private exam centres don’t tend to require particular exam boards. They will normally provide for any exam board.

It's likely to be at a school, and they could arrange for any, though might prefer one or the other. But any will certainly be possible to arrange, which is why they will be looking for an pros or cons of different boards, given that there is the luxury of choosing!