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I don't understand the UMS marking system

Can someone please explain this?
I don't really understand it either because I'm trying to use it to work out grades for my past papers.

But basically what it is when you do an exam paper you get awarded a raw mark for that paper, depending on the difficulty of the paper the exam board convert that mark to UMS mark then use it to determine your grade. E.g in a paper say you got 55 marks out of 100 that could be 89 UMS and it would maybe be a D because of 55 out of 100.
Reply 2
so basically you'll sit an exam which say could be a total of 120 marks, this what is called raw marks because it's just the usual marks of the paper.

UMS is when this number is converted into a percentage out of 100 because obviously it's easier to set grade boundaries round a maximum of 100. It's just for easier statistical use really.
Reply 3
There are a different number of marks available for different papers and then those papers carry different weights in regard to the overall qualification. Therefore exam boards convert RAW marks (those you get on the exam papers and coursework) to UMS so that they can determine your overall grade easily. For example if the exam is a quarter of the overall grade but the marks available for that paper are 60, they need to work out the marks for that paper out of 25% - the easiest way of doing this is to convert them to UMS marks.
Original post by adz234
I don't really understand it either because I'm trying to use it to work out grades for my past papers.

But basically what it is when you do an exam paper you get awarded a raw mark for that paper, depending on the difficulty of the paper the exam board convert that mark to UMS mark then use it to determine your grade. E.g in a paper say you got 55 marks out of 100 that could be 89 UMS and it would maybe be a D because of 55 out of 100.


So, if I get 27 raw marks out of 75 in a biology paper which is a C in OCR B and another C in my other biology exam. Overall I wouldn't get a C?

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