Paper improvements for summer 2023

By Shaun Procter-Green
Published 27 September 2022

Our Maths Assessment Lead, Shaun Procter-Green, explores the further improvements we’ve made to our GCSE Maths papers and the expertise behind those changes.

I hope many of you had the chance to attend the webinar on Thursday 22 September outlining the improvements we’ve made to our GCSE Maths papers for summer 2023. You’ll have heard Andrew Taylor, our Head of Maths, and I talk about how we’ve been updating our papers with the insight and knowledge we’ve gained from analysing previous exam series.

From better understanding how students access the questions, particularly Foundation students, to the best use of multiple-choice questions, we want to offer you the strongest exams we can.

In case you missed it, take a look at the video in which I talk about these improvements. You can also watch the webinar on-demand using the link below.

Video transcript

Good afternoon – I’m Shaun Procter-Green, AQA’s Mathematics Assessment Lead.

I’d like to bring you up to speed with the further improvements we’ve made to our GCSE maths papers and the expertise behind those changes.

We’ve listened to your ongoing feedback and we want to make our maths exams work for your students, particularly those sitting our GCSE foundation papers. You’ve told us that we write strong questions in comparison to other exam boards but there was still room to make our papers even better.

We want our offering to be the best it possibly can be for you and the students you teach.  Ofqual has approved the improvements we’ve made and I’d like to run you through them:

Firstly, we’ve changed the order of the questions in AQA papers to make sure all the early questions are low demand.. The expertise behind this is to give students confidence, by answering a few basic questions early on to get them going.

These early questions have changed format too – we’ll no longer have four multiple choice questions at the start of each paper. In future, we’ll only use multiple choice when we’re sure it’s the best way to assess content or skills, meaning there’ll be far fewer questions like this in our exams - maybe only one or two in a typical paper. We’ve done this so that students wont second guess themselves. Instead, there’ll be straight forward open questions to help them relax right off the bat.

During these changes, we’ve maintained and redoubled our focus on simple language, ensuring all text is to the point and doesn’t mislead. You’ll notice an avoidance of Assessment Objective 2 mathematical communication early in the exam - rather than saying things like ‘show that’, which implies a need for detailed workings to be noted down, questions now say things like ‘work out’.

I think it’s worth me clarifying here that we’re not making questions in exam papers easier, we’re just making sure they’re as clear as possible and fall in an order that fosters confidence. We want to avoid students losing hope in the middle of a paper because of a tricky start and these amends will support that goal.

Looking at the higher tier papers, we’re making similar changes, cutting down on multiple choice questions and ensuring language is straightforward, but these exams are performing well so it’s about continuing that success. The majority of our focus has been on our GCSE foundation exams where far more adaptations have been introduced to improve results for your students.

Thank you for your invaluable feedback, which has supported these improvements, and we hope it’ll lead to a tangible change for your students.

Let us know your thoughts and get in touch if you have any questions.

And finally, good luck for the school year ahead.

Watch our free summer webinar on demand

If you weren’t able to attend, you can watch it on-demand now.

We shared useful information the summer exam outcomes, improvements to our GCSE papers, support for mock exams and key assessment dates. Plus, as usual, we answered some of your questions in a live Q&A.