Grade boundaries and grade allocations.

Okay so this may be dumb but no one has ever managed to explain this to me in my school so asking here lol

So Grade boundaries essentially consider the performance of everyone on the exam, meaning that across the years people get the same grade for the same performance right?

So why do some qualifications, for example WJEC Further Mathematics, give over 50% of their candidates A*, whereas other qualifications give as low as 10% of candidates an A*?

I’ve taken into consideration candidate number sizes, and don’t think that can cause such a disparity.

Thanks to anyone who can answer!

im not exactly sure but maybe its about the difficulty of the qualifications? Like if its more difficult the grade boundaries are lower so u need less percentage to get an A* whereas if its a generally easy qualification, the grade boundaries are put higher as a lot of people do really well so its more difficult to get an A* since u need to do better than a bunch of other people with already good results. if u get what I mean

Okay so this may be dumb but no one has ever managed to explain this to me in my school so asking here lol

So Grade boundaries essentially consider the performance of everyone on the exam, meaning that across the years people get the same grade for the same performance right?

So why do some qualifications, for example WJEC Further Mathematics, give over 50% of their candidates A*, whereas other qualifications give as low as 10% of candidates an A*?

I’ve taken into consideration candidate number sizes, and don’t think that can cause such a disparity.

Thanks to anyone who can answer!

An external authority ensures that grades are comparable between all the exam boards.

Yeah but if the qualification is more difficult, it won't matter if the A* grade boundary is lower, since it would be harder to get to that boundary anyway. I just think that difficulty just varies between exam boards and subjects, can't really do much about that. E.g. I have to get like 95% for an A* in one subject but only 70% for an A* in another.

Yeah, that's true, but how close can you really get in terms of difficulty between exam boards for certain subjects? Like for English Lit, the texts set might be of varying difficulty, and there'll be different assessment objectives.

For the differences between subjects there's more to it than just the difficulty of the exams.

If it was just set that for example, 20% of students should be awarded an A or higher in every subject then that would be very unfair for further maths students (just one example) because they would be competing against a very strong talent pool to get in the top 20%.

Yeah, that's true, but how close can you really get in terms of difficulty between exam boards for certain subjects? Like for English Lit, the texts set might be of varying difficulty, and there'll be different assessment objectives.

For the differences between subjects there's more to it than just the difficulty of the exams. E.g. normally over 50% of students are awarded an A or higher in further maths but for English Language it's normally less than 20%, independent of how difficult both sets of exams are. This seems unfair but one of the reasons for it is that the talent pool for further maths is much stronger i.e. the average further maths A Level student did better in their GCSEs across all subjects than the average English Language A Level student.

If it was just set that for example, 20% of students should be awarded an A or higher in every subject then that would be very unfair for further maths students (just one example) because they would be competing against a very strong talent pool to get in the top 20%.

For the differences between subjects there's more to it than just the difficulty of the exams. E.g. normally over 50% of students are awarded an A or higher in further maths but for English Language it's normally less than 20%, independent of how difficult both sets of exams are. This seems unfair but one of the reasons for it is that the talent pool for further maths is much stronger i.e. the average further maths A Level student did better in their GCSEs across all subjects than the average English Language A Level student.

If it was just set that for example, 20% of students should be awarded an A or higher in every subject then that would be very unfair for further maths students (just one example) because they would be competing against a very strong talent pool to get in the top 20%.