Former examination board Maths Adviser. Occasional comments about UK exams. No longer posting here.
Essex, England
Joined March 2020
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Graham Cumming retweeted
After 6+ months of back & forth with OCR over last summer’s GCSE maths exams, this complaint has been upheld by Ofqual. It’s not enough. OCR must go further & re-mark. Many students have lost out! @Miss_Snuffy you’ll be very interested! ocrmaths2025bounds.netlify.a…
You can find more detailed data for Pearson (eg by tier, sex, age, centre type) on the emporium; I don’t think other boards (or indeed JCQ) provide it
mathsemporium.com/category/g…
The tables are collated from the exam board results statistics pages:
qualifications.pearson.com/e…
aqa.org.uk/exams-administrat…
ocr.org.uk/administration/re…
eduqas.co.uk/home/administra…
I think exam boards will try out a few online exams out (probably not before 2030) and then default back to what we have now; as the quote in article says, “people who want to do bad things are probably working at a quicker pace”.
Last summer, IGCSE Maths in the UK accounted for ~6% of the total GCSE/IGCSE Maths entry for Year 11, but of the Grade 9s awarded, ~30% went to students of IGCSE Maths. I guess this is what you pay your 20% VAT for!
You’ll be pleased to know I finally have a reply - in June 2025 there were 38,761 awards made for IGCSE Maths to UK students (mostly at Higher tier, but 6012 at Foundation) - down a bit on last year’s 39,304, so perhaps some Year 11s were hauled out of private school after all
Something for those #coremaths lessons
ROBERTS: If you cut something by 100%, the cost goes down to 0. If you cut it by 600%, the drug companies are actually paying you to take their product. So it raises the question -- how much of last night's speech was hyperbole?
LUTNICK: No. What he's saying is if a drug was $100 and you bring the drug down to $13, if you're looking at it from $13, it's down 7 times
ROBERTS: It's not a 600% cut
LUTNICK: But it's 700% higher price before. It's down 700% now. So $13 would have to go up 700% to get back to the old one. So it all depends on when you look at it.
Monthly haircuts should be compulsory, says barber
Thrillers should be on UK school curriculum to boost reading, says Lee Child | The Guardian theguardian.com/education/20…
The best option for existing exam boards would be for there to be an a separate start-up boutique online exams only board - then if the exams go wrong, they take all the blame and disappear, but if exams go right, the other boards can fight to buy it out
5/5
Ofqual too have shown themselves to be reluctant about online exams. They (and by extension the DfE and Secretary of State) will get the rap if the online exams, most likely, go wrong and the exam board(s) will get the credit if they go right
4/5
The other exam boards could then pause any online exam development while happily hoovering up regular business from the one that got it wrong, maintaining their reputations for stability, security, integrity, etc etc
3/5
However, each exam board is terrified that a competitor will get in first and take all future online business, so all have to work on it. Ideally, for each exam board, one of the others would go online first and have a major disaster, potentially putting it out of business
2/5
None of the exam boards really want to introduce online exams at scale - they’ll be expensive, time-consuming and with a good chance of going wrong (95% right wouldn’t be good enough, probably not even 99%), and they carry a large risk of reputational damage
🧵1/5
“And teach me how / To name the bigger light, and how the less, /
That burn by day and night…” - oops, wrong RSC
Chemistry curriculum fails to reflect digital reality, RSC warns | TES tes.com/magazine/news/genera…
Looks like there was a successful petition in South Korea theguardian.com/world/2025/d…
Consultation here: gov.uk/government/consultati…
Well that was a quick turnaround tes.com/magazine/news/genera…
