From The Student Room

TSR Wiki > Study Help > Exams and Qualifications > A Levels > UMS

---

UMS

A Uniform Mark Scheme, or UMS, is a way of standardising the marking of papers across examination boards, allowing one to compare two marks marked by two different examination boards. Grades are then calculated using grade boundaries set at particular UMS scores.

In subjects such as sciences or mathematics where it is relatively easy to get a full score if you know the content very well then the UMS and raw scores are likely to correlate quite well. However, in subjective subjects like English or languages where a full score is less likely a lower score, of perhaps 85, will be sufficient to gain a full UMS of 100.

UMS is set at 300 UMS for the AS, 600 UMS for the A2. But each of the individual units for each stage, AS or A2, are not always equally weighted. In Mathematics A-level (all specifications), every unit is weighted equally at 1/3 (33.3%) of the AS or 1/6 (16.7%) of the A-level: thus every unit is worth 100 UMS. With two-unit A-levels e.g. Chinese, there is one unit per stage, so every unit is equally weighted at 100% of the AS, 50% of the A-level; therefore it will be worth 300 UMS. However, there may be subjects which allocate the units unequally: OCR Critical Thinking has four units, worth 20%, 30%, 20%, 30% of a whole A-level; therefore the units are worth 120, 180, 120 and 180 UMS respectively. Units can be worth 15% (90 UMS), 16.7% or 1/6 (100 UMS), 17.5% (105 UMS), 20% (120 UMS), 30% (180 UMS), or 50% (300 UMS).

This also means that the UMS of grades, which are always the same percentages (A = 80%, B = 70%, C = 60%, D = 50%, E = 40%), will be different for differently weighted units.

Grade	A-level UMS mark /600	AS-level UMS mark /300
A	480	240
B	420	210
C	360	180
D	300	150
E	240	120
U	0	0

Grade	Module UMS mark /90	Module UMS mark /100	Percentage UMS required
A	72	80	80
B	63	70	70
C	54	60	60
D	45	50	50
E	36	40	40
U	0	0	0

From 2008, UMS will be renamed SMS, for 'Standardised Mark Scheme'. Also, most subjects will move from 600 to 400 SMS for the A-level, and from 300 to 200 SMS for the AS (all the four-unit A-levels will make this shift), but those subjects staying at six units (Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Electronics, Geology, Human Biology, Science, Music, Mathematics/Further Maths/Further Maths Additional) will stay as 600 SMS for the A-level, 300 SMS for AS. The two-unit and three-unit specifications (Bengali, Modern Hebrew, Panjabi, Polish, Arabic, Japanese, Modern Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Dutch, Gujarati, Persian, Portuguese, and Turkish; Chinese will be three-unit) will all move to 200 SMS for the A-level, 100 SMS for the AS.