UMS Marks

What are UMS Marks? Can someone explain to me?x

UMS stands for Uniform Mark Scale. In your exams, you'll get raw marks and a UMS mark- your raw mark will be the exact mark you got on the paper (eg 46/60), but your UMS is the mark you get that determines your grade, so they take into account paper weightings and exam difficulty (so in the previous example it could have been equally difficult to get 46 and 48 one year and another, but they would both come out at the same UMS)

Hope this makes sense :h:

Reply 2

Maths is Life

Original post by Aishah Sid

What are UMS Marks? Can someone explain to me?x

Or I mean you could google search for the bants.

Uniform Marking Scheme/Scale
Exams boards usually use these to represent the difficulty/ambiguity of exams.

The usual 100UMS for a module may not be full raw marks(100%)
It was just a system that was used so that module marks could be compared with other exam boards and is good for distinguishing between able students and people who only just scraped the grade, Some top Universities may request UMS marks (mostly for STEM subjects) in decision making.

This is my version of what I think UMS is. Just look up for a definition.

Exam boards set the required raw mark equivalent to a UMS mark.

Ex. 72/75 may still be 100UMS although it's not 100%
Some extreme cases such as C4 in A level Maths, specifically WJEC C4 2015, 80% was 100UMS, 65/75. Showing the level of ambiguity compared to past papers.

Exam boards set grade boundaries on how well the majority of students found the paper.

For reformed A levels, UMS is being left behind so Exam Boards just set boundaries based on raw marks.
We know that 80% is an A for an average paper, however this can be lower.
Ex. OCR A Physics AS was 70% for an A, 42/60