What goes into the minds of examiners when they make one year particularly harder than another year? Do they take into the account that there have been many more years of past papers therefore they feel they can set more challenging questions are students should be well versed in the more normal questions?
Thing is though if people find the paper much harder than normal then the grade boundary is lowered so similar proportion of students get a particular grade. In that case what even was the point of making it harder in the first place if the only effect is to lower the confidence of the students coming out of the exam?
A particular problem with the ums system, which I know is being phased out, is that the most able students who get very high marks aren't differentiated from the students who got very high but not quite as high marks (100 ums having a plateau that can span quite a large range).
I guess the thing is that I'm just salty about the ocr maths c4 exam. I likely did get an A* on the paper however I didn't come out of the exam feeling very confident. It's probably a good thing that exams have more challenging questions where you have to think about things more however the fact that the first half had a lot of the more normal questions in a simpler setting meant that you had to be really really quick at that stuff to have a chance to solve the harder problems later on. There was also a 1 mark graph question that you really had to do more than 1 mark's worth of working out on however it was only 1 mark because graphical calculators are a thing.