Maths 2023 Grade boundaries guess

Sunday morning musings. I am parent..while the child is studying….

I understand it is difficult to predict grade boundaries and some have speculated they will rise this year as both effect of Covid and newness of the syllabus recedes in background. But I wonder if this assumption is true or is it a fact that new curriculum is relatively more difficult than what it was previously (modular).

What could be this boundaries this year for A*, A and B?

I got my child to aim for 75/80 pc marks so she ends up A*. Fair?

Also, are grade boundaries determined by percentile of cohorts to align it with previous years? Or is it some random criteria used at whims of board officials?

Reply 1

econgirrrl

no one truly knows, but i'm pretty sure that 75/80 would be an A* even if grade boundaries rise a little. having said that, you mentioned that the boundaries may rise a bit considering that the new curriculum is slightly more difficult than the previous, but actually if the curriculum/exam paper is harder then that will reduce the grade boundaries, not increase them.

Reply 2

Agent599494

i'm not completely sure but from what i have heard exam boards will first mark all exams and input all the data into a massive spreadsheet then using the data they calculate trends and they make the grade boundaries from that. This means that if it can be seen that the majority of people who sat the exam did really bad then they will make all the grade boundaries a lot lower however they could also make the grade boundaries a lot higher if everyone did well so to be frank with you it does't matter what your child got as It depends on what the entirerty of the cohort got as a whole which means your child could have got very low but if the cohort also got low it is still possible to get A/A*. but if your child got high and the cohort got high they may still miss the A/A*.

Reply 3

Sgcheam

Original post by econgirrrl

No, there are other replies in this forum in different thread that suggested grade boundaries in previous years was lower because for other reasons such as newness. However, I reckon it maybe because new syllabus is more difficult to score and if papers are similar to previous years papers, then grade boundaries may not change much. My daughter is scoring around 62%-68% in previous years question papers (as mocks), last paper she did was couple of weeks back and we hope she scales to 75%. Our targets are based on benchmarking performance on previous years papers (as mock). The base case will be she scores 63% and still ends up with a B, leaving us wondering if more time should have been spent. Maths is just a nice to have subject for her, much of it will not be useful to her in future, so tbh only targeting grades.

This is overthinking, :smile: