Confusion around GCSE Grades

Received my GCSE's today like many of you guys, I got a B in Biology AQA. With this I was wondering how they add up each exam to work out an overall grade? I tried to work out how many marks I needed to get an A, and I thought the way to work it out would be to add up the minimum grades for an A in each paper change it into UMS marks, then compare it with my actual UMS marks added all up together. Is that the way to work it out? I can't find the answer on the AQA website, so totally confused.

If it helps my grades for the papers were:
Unit 1: 79 UMS
Unit 2: 81 UMS
Unit 3: 75 UMS
Unit 4: 83 UMS
Which adds up to 318 UMS
Which got me a B overall

Then the Grade boundaries for an A grade is:
Unit 1: 80 UMS
Unit 2: 80 UMS
Unit 3: 80 UMS
Unit 4: 80 UMS

Adding up to 320 UMS

(edited 6 years ago)

Reply 1

Kevin De Bruyne

Original post by nevbear

I think you're confusing yourself, because you've said something quite complicated but then correctly added up your UMS to 318 which is how your overall grade was reached.

A few tips to help understand:

1. The 80 UMS figures you are looking at are the near-useless version of the grade boundaries. I'm guessing your exams were out of 100 UMS, in which case 80 UMS is, as far as I am aware, ALWAYS an A. 70 is a B, 60 is a C etc. In terms of UMS, 80% of the max UMS is always an A, so here it's because it's out of 100 that it's identical, if an exam had 150 UMS then 80% of it (120) would be an A. I think what you're trying to look at is raw marks to UMS, which I will explain in point 3.

2. Yes, the overall grade boundaries are a sum of the individual grade boundaries for UMS (where you have done 80 * 4 = 320) but an easier way to think about it is that the max UMS is 400, 80% of it is 320 hence 320 is an A. Similar to point 1.

3. 80 UMS out of 100 is always an A as in point 1, but the RAW MARKS in the exam to get 80 UMS can change depending on how the raw marks to UMS grade boundaries are set. For example, in an exam out of 75 marks, one year 58 marks might get you 80 UMS, next year it could be 63. This is probably what you are interested in, but there is no easy way of combining raw marks to total UMS for all exams - you can only do it for each unit individually. By this I mean if in your Unit 1 79 UMS was equal to 59 marks, and 60 marks was equal to 81 UMS according to the grade boundaries, then you could say that if you had 1 extra mark in Unit 1 then you would have 320 UMS which is an A. You can say the same for any other unit but not all of them aggregated (i.e. You got 240 raw marks in total , 1
More would get you an A is not necessarily true)