Question 1

What are GCSE Maths grade boundaries?

Accepted Answer

A grade boundary is the minimum raw mark a student needs across all three exam papers to be awarded a given grade. Exam boards set them after every exam series, once every student has sat the papers, to keep results consistent from year to year even though the papers themselves vary in difficulty.

Question 2

Why do grade boundaries change every year?

Accepted Answer

Boards adjust boundaries up or down depending on how hard that year’s papers turned out to be, so that a grade 5 in a harder year still represents the same standard of work as a grade 5 in an easier year. This is why the same grade can need a different mark from one year to the next.

Question 3

Were there real grade boundaries in 2020 and 2021?

Accepted Answer

No. Exams were cancelled both years because of COVID-19, and grades were awarded as Centre Assessed Grades (2020) and Teacher Assessed Grades (2021) instead. No genuine raw-mark boundaries exist for those two years, which is why they are left out of the tables on this page.

Question 4

Are AQA, Edexcel and OCR grade boundaries the same?

Accepted Answer

No. Each board writes and grades its own papers, so their boundaries are set independently and are rarely identical. AQA and Edexcel mark GCSE Maths out of 240 (three 80-mark papers), while OCR marks it out of 300 (three 100-mark papers), so their boundaries aren’t directly comparable as raw numbers either.

GCSE Maths Grade Boundaries, 2017-2025.

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