Calculating UMS

There must be someone who can help me untangle the enigma of UMS...

Taking 2014 OCR English Literature as an example:

Say I got a mark of 55 in F661, how would I convert that to UMS?

I tried working out the difference between an A and a B in raw marks (54-46=8) and, as each grade is separated by 10% UMS, calculated that 1 mark is equal to 1.25% (8/10 = 1.25), which equates to 1.5 UMS (0.0125 x 120 = 1.5).

As I got 1 mark above the A boundary, this would mean I have a UMS of 97.5 (96 + 1.25 = 97.5)

However, if I did the same calculation with a mark of 60 (full marks), this would equate to just 105 UMS ((1.25 x 6) + 96), but full marks MUST be 120 UMS. So am I barking up the wrong tree? If so, how on God's earth do you do this?

As far as I know full UMS does not necessarily mean full marks. You can still achieve full UMS without attaining full marks in an exam. At least that's the case with AQA anyway


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There must be someone who can help me untangle the enigma of UMS...

Taking 2014 OCR English Literature as an example:

Say I got a mark of 55 in F661, how would I convert that to UMS?

I tried working out the difference between an A and a B in raw marks (54-46=8) and, as each grade is separated by 10% UMS, calculated that 1 mark is equal to 1.25% (8/10 = 1.25), which equates to 1.5 UMS (0.0125 x 120 = 1.5).

As I got 1 mark above the A boundary, this would mean I have a UMS of 97.5 (96 + 1.25 = 97.5)

However, if I did the same calculation with a mark of 60 (full marks), this would equate to just 105 UMS ((1.25 x 6) + 96), but full marks MUST be 120 UMS. So am I barking up the wrong tree? If so, how on God's earth do you do this?

Usually you can just linearly extrapolate the difference of the A and B grade throughout the raw to UMS conversion upto full ums as you have done.

However, if the a grade is so high that extrapolating the difference will cause the full ums to require more than 100% raw marks (in this case extrapolating would mean 70/60 is needed for 120 ums, which is clearly impossible) then you have to use a different system.

The A* (90% ums mark) is placed half way between 100% ums and the A grade so in this case 108 ums is 57/60 raw. Therefore 55/60 raw is 100 ums.

Hope that sort of makes sense