Confused about UMS?

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That was the top 1% of marks.

In my year it went as low as 42/60 for 100 UMS in biology...
That means that the top 1% of people got 42 or more.

Oh, okay

Wow, really? What year was that?

Reply 21

IFoundWonderland

Original post by suzylemonade

Oh, okay

Wow, really? What year was that?

First sitting of the exam - January 2012 I believe :biggrin:

Reply 22

suzylemonade

Oh yeah, another question. Is it UMS or raw marks/percentage that is put on your results sheet?

Reply 23

RVNmax

Original post by suzylemonade

Oh yeah, another question. Is it UMS or raw marks/percentage that is put on your results sheet?

UMS.

80% of your total exam UMS marks is an A.
70% is a B
60% C... etc.

So if your paper is 100 UMS marks in Total, an A > 80 UMS marks.

If your paper is 120 UMS marks in total, an A > 96 UMS marks.

Don't worry about why they have different UMS for different exams. I think it's because a GCSE is equivalent to a certain amount of UMS, say 300 (I don't actually know if it's 300, so pretend), then you will need 80% of 300 to get an A in your GCSE, which is 240 UMS.
So if the GCSE consists of 3 papers all worth the same each, all will be worth 100 UMS, of which you will need 80 UMS in each to get an A in each, but can get an A overall as long as the total UMS adds up to 240.
But if there were only 2 exam papers both worth the same, then each exam will be worth 150 UMS. Hopefully you get the gist.

And as we said before, UMS is different to Raw marks. Raw marks get converted to UMS marks to standardise the exam results. So if you have one exam for a GCSE, which is worth the whole of the GCSE, so 300 UMS. You need 240/300 UMS in that exam.
to get that 240 out of 300, you cannot say for sure how many raw marks you will need. so if the paper is only out of 60 raw marks, and the paper is really hard, don't worry. The UMS for an A will be 240/300 (or 80/100 or whatever), but probably be a bit lower than 80% of 60 raw marks. But it can be higher as well if it was an easy paper. :smile:

You won't get told your raw marks, but you can go online and have a look at the conversions and have a guess. This is also useful when taking mock exams, to know how much you actually got and to evaluate how hard/easy that paper was.