Grade boundaries

A grade boundary is the lowest mark that gets a grade. Boards set them after each exam has been marked, so they change from year to year: a harder paper usually has lower boundaries. To see what grade a past paper would have got you, add up your marks and read them against that year’s boundaries.

Yes. Every course page that lists past papers also shows the newest grade boundaries for that course and has a Grade boundaries link beside each series of papers, so you can mark a paper and read your grade from the same year’s table.

Every table is copied from the exam board’s own published grade boundary document for that series, which is linked under the table. We lay them out by course and year so you don’t have to search a document covering every subject, and nothing is changed or estimated.

Yes. On any course’s grade boundaries page, choose Keep in my grade boundaries under a year’s table to keep it in your cookie account. Then open a question deck’s Grade boundaries page and pick it, or search every board’s boundaries from there, and your predicted grade on that deck is read against your exam’s real numbers. Each grade becomes a percentage of the maximum mark, and deck mastery is not an exam mark, so the grade is a rough guide.

On results day. For UK summer exams that is mid August for A levels and a week later for GCSEs; SQA’s come in early August, and Cambridge’s in August, January and May. We add them after that, often a year before the papers themselves are released.