Top five FAQs: your questions, answered

By Carly Hayton and Robin Harris
Published 03 May 2022

Carly and Robin reflect on the questions you asked most during our spring term events.

As we move into the summer term with an eye on the first summer exam series since the start of the pandemic, we didn’t want to miss the opportunity to reflect on the spring term events and the brilliant questions you’ve asked us – some in person and some virtually. We’ve collected and answered the top five frequently asked questions asked by you at #MathsConf28, Maths round up spring webinar and MathsConfOnline, as well as on social media and email – we hope sharing these will give you a better picture of our plans for this summer, and beyond.

Top five frequently asked questions:

Are the Foundation paper changes just for summer 2022?

No, the improvements aren’t connected to the temporary changes introduced to make allowances for the impact of the pandemic. They’re part of the continuous review and improvement process which is in place for all our qualifications. We want to build on these improvements for future series to ensure that the Foundation tier papers continue to be the best they can be.

Why are there no changes to the Higher tier? Will you be making any? Is this the extent of the changes you’ll be making to your papers? Can we expect further changes?

Looking at performance data over the three ‘normal years’, we feel that the Higher tier has performed closer to our expectations. However, as well as looking at the data, we’ve talked to a lot of teachers and are always considering what improvements can be made. We’ll continue to review our assessments and make improvements where we can to ensure they’re the best assessments for all students. We’ll let you know about more improvements coming soon.

Are you releasing any more papers/tests for us to use as mocks or other internal assessments?

Our most recent papers will stay secure and, as well as these, we’ve released GCSE shadow papers based on 2020 and 2021. We’ll also be releasing 2022 shadow papers as soon as we can. We’ll be revising all four of our sets of practice papers to reflect recent and future improvements.

What are the arrangements for the November 2022 exams, for summer 2023 and beyond?

Ofqual has confirmed that, as November 2022 is primarily a re-sit opportunity from the summer, the arrangements will be the same. This means there will be advance information for the content covered in the exams, which will be released on 27 June 2022, and we will again provide formulae sheets. It also means that we’ll carry forward the standard of the summer 2022 exams.

Final decisions regarding summer 2023 and beyond have yet to be made but Ofqual has indicated that they expect the standards to return to pre-pandemic levels from summer 2023 onwards. This means that the standards will be aligned with the last pre-pandemic summer award – June 2019, meaning that approximately the same proportion of students will gain a grade 4, 7 etc as that year, allowing for any known differences in the relative abilities of the cohorts. We’ll keep you posted on any other arrangements for summer 2023.

What will the grade boundaries be in November 2022 and summer 2023?

It’s always difficult to predict grade boundaries since it’s impossible to be certain that two different sets of exams are of exactly the same standard. However, AQA has a good track record for consistency when it comes to grade boundaries for GCSE Maths and, since the standard for November 2022 will be the same as that of summer 2022, we’d expect the grade boundaries to be similar.

The grade boundaries for summer 2023 will be much harder to predict. Whilst the standard is expected to return to that which was in place pre-pandemic, this refers to outcomes (proportion of students gaining grade 4, 7 etc) rather than the exact demand of the papers which is harder to assess statistically. We don’t know how exam performance in 2023 will be affected by this cohort’s disrupted learning.

We hope that the improvements we’ll be making to our papers may help to alleviate any lost learning but that isn’t why we’re making the improvements – we’re making them so that our assessments are the best they can be for all students.

We provide Mock Exam Analysers for use with all our past papers as well as our practice papers, although, of course, the practice papers don’t have grade boundaries attached to them. Exampro’s MERiT tool could also prove to be invaluable this year as it may provide the only way for you to compare your school’s performance with that of other schools prior to the summer 2023 exams.

Watch our free summer webinar on demand

On Thursday 12 May we held our termly webinar, Maths round up, and for those of you that were able to join us – we hope that you found it useful.

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

We shared useful information on assessment design, the marking process and key assessment dates. Plus, as usual, we answered some of your questions in a live Q&A.