A Level AQA Grade Boundries

I'm a little confused... Like in all subjects, in physics we were told that generally 80% equates to an A, 70% to a B, 60% to a C and so on, but obviously this is a rough estimate as the grade boundaries vary from year to year. However looking on the AQA website for unit 4/5 A level physics, getting a raw mark of 56/75 (76%) I would have thought equated to a B on the June 2011 paper. However the converter shows that getting 56/75 gives you a grade of A*. Losing 19 marks and getting A* doesn't make sense, and it looks the be the same for all Unit 4/5 papers. Am I missing something here? or are the grade boundaries actually that low?

This is the converter: http://www.aqa.org.uk/exams-administration/about-results/uniform-mark-scale/convert-marks-to-ums

Reply 1

trasitszy

Original post by Squiffyk7

No you are right- physics grade boundaries are awesomely low! It is 80% UMS not 80% raw marks that you need to get an A! Not sure why this is, but I am not going to complain!
Boundaries are higher in other subjects like chemistry unfortunately.
Good luck with your exams :smile:

Reply 2

Squiffyk7

Original post by trasitszy

Okay thanks but what about the ISAs? In our class no one got above 35 in that, and some of us are hoping to get an A in physics. We all agree the the ISA questions are 100x harder than the exam questions, and apparently other schools cheat on the ISAs which is why they are so hard? I'm pretty sure I got a 32 in my ISA which seems to convert to a U in most of the past years. What do you think I need to get in my papers to get an A in physics overall?

The qualification seems so broken to have an ISA that's alot harder than the paper, with much harsher grade boundries than the exam were you can score A* having lost 15 marks.

Reply 3

YoloSwagginz

I feel like that they should ask better questions instead of just lowering the UMS, I mean on a few papers I've seen An A go as low as 45/70, and the ability to get 60/70 will equate to 120 ums? I feel like this is the result of stupid/obscure questions being asked so a large population will get them wrong, looking at math 73/75 most likely will net 120 ums and to get an A you can only drop like 11 marks

bump

AQA physics is so stupid, they ask obscure questions that nobody can ever answer that are nothing to do with the specification, so it's no wonder that you can drop over 20 marks, geting less then 70% on the paper and somehow still coming away with an A. The ISA's are stupid aswell, they should know by now that a ridiculous amount of schools cheat, everyone should be required to do EMPA's instead as it would be much fairer in my opinion.

Reply 6

Nabbles

Adding to what the others have said, for a lot of the worded questions, you can often answer a question with correct and relevant facts, but unless you write exactly what they want, you will loose the marks.
My school does EMPAs so I can't really speak for the ISAs

Reply 7

Squiffyk7

Original post by Nabbles

I know exactly what you mean, the whole qualification just seems to be so broken haha. It's why I prefer maths A level so much more because its just a case of doing what the question asks to get the full marks, whilst this isn't the case in physics at A level...