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Are there grade boundaries at university maths?

I was just wondering this because I had such a hard third year exam and everyone thought the same. It was unimaginably hard.
Reply 1
Original post by cooldudeman
I was just wondering this because I had such a hard third year exam and everyone thought the same. It was unimaginably hard.


Yes, definitely. Your performance is always measured against your peers, so they'll make the class boundaries lower if the exam was significantly tougher so that a certain % of students get a first or along those lines, the details will vary from uni to uni, but rest assured that if everyone found it hard, you will get the grade you deserve none the less.
Sort of. At most (maybe? All the ones I've looked into, at any rate) unis the boundaries are always the same, in terms of the number on the final score list (so if it says 68% on the sheet at the end, you've got a 2:1), but those numbers aren't necessarily actually percentages, and don't map exactly to the marks that you get, and they rescale the marks accordingly. This can lead to some weird things ("wait, I got more marks on that exam than I attempted", and so on), but it works.
Original post by BlueSam3
Sort of. At most (maybe? All the ones I've looked into, at any rate) unis the boundaries are always the same, in terms of the number on the final score list (so if it says 68% on the sheet at the end, you've got a 2:1), but those numbers aren't necessarily actually percentages, and don't map exactly to the marks that you get, and they rescale the marks accordingly. This can lead to some weird things ("wait, I got more marks on that exam than I attempted", and so on), but it works.


Ive just found 2 of my exams so impossible to cope with. Well especially one of them where literally EVERYONE said it was amazingly hard (linear analysis). I'd just be shocked if our marks weren't scaled a bit up otherwise 90% of my class will get at max 50% lol.

Have there been similar situations to what I'm in?

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Reply 4
This does happen to make it fair year on year. They may scale the marks up if the average percentage is considerably less than usual (i.e. considerably less than 65% probably). Or they may just adjust the marking to be more generous (i.e. allocate more marks to the easier (earlier) parts of the questions).

But the system is definitely not as robust as A level. The % getting firsts will not be identical each year for that particular exam.

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