Why Are A-Level Maths Grade Boundaries Going Up?

Every August a student works out what they needed, compares it with last year, and finds the bar has moved again. In June 2019 a grade A in Edexcel A-Level maths took 165 marks out of 300. This summer it took 210.

The usual explanation is that students keep getting better, so the bar keeps rising.

That explanation is not what moved the boundary, and the exam board’s own figures show why. What the boundary really means changes how you should revise, which is why it is worth two minutes.

Everything below is Edexcel A-Level maths, specification 9MA0, marked out of 300 across three papers. The AS is a separate qualification with its own cohort and its own boundaries, and it is not in these figures.

---

Forty five marks bought nine tenths of a point

In June 2019, 55,777 students sat 9MA0 and 40.6% of them got a grade A or better. The boundary was 165.

In June 2026, 79,068 sat it and 41.5% got a grade A or better. The boundary was 210.

Forty five more marks. Nine tenths of a percentage point more students. Those 2026 shares are Pearson’s provisional figures, which it revises later; the boundaries are final.

Pearson Edexcel A-Level maths 9MA0

Marks needed for a grade A, out of 300

155

2019: 165 2026: 210

215

164 to 214 marks across the 6 series

Share who got a grade A or better

30%

2019 and 2026: 40.6% and 41.5%

50%

40.6% to 46.9% across the same 6 series

If the rising boundary were the year group getting stronger, you would expect the bottom rail to move with the top one. It did not. There is also a reason it could not move much, which is further down this page.

A student who trained to hit 60% would have comfortably earned an A in 2019. The same 180 marks this summer would have been a B, because the B boundary was 173 and an A took 210.

The year that shows which way round it works

If a bar rises when students get better, a year when the bar jumps should be a year when more students clear it.

June 2022 to June 2023 was the exact opposite. The grade A boundary rose 32 marks, from 164 to 196, and the share getting an A or better fell six points, from 46.9% to 40.9%.

Boundaries up, outcomes down, in the same series. That was Ofqual pulling results back to pre-pandemic levels after two years of teacher assessed grades. It was policy, not a weaker year group meeting a harder paper.

Can we tell whether A-Level students are getting better?

No, and it is worth knowing why not, because it stops you being sold an answer by either side.

Before the papers are marked, Ofqual works out roughly what share of this year group should get each grade. For A-Level it predicts that from the GCSE results those same students got two years earlier. The boundaries are then set so the outcome comes out close to that prediction.

So the share getting a grade A is close to a decision made in advance. It holds steady because it is held steady, and a number that is held steady cannot tell you whether anybody improved.

For GCSE maths there is a way round this. Ofqual runs a separate test each February and March, in about 350 schools. The questions are kept the same year after year, and that test is allowed to move. In 2026 it showed a real improvement at the top in GCSE maths, and Ofqual told the exam boards to let the grades reflect it. We have set that out in why GCSE maths grade boundaries are going up.

There is no equivalent test above GCSE. Nothing independent measures an A-Level year group.

So the figures on this page can tell you exactly what the boundary did. They cannot tell you whether the 2026 cohort was stronger at maths than the 2019 one. Anyone who tells you that, in either direction, is guessing.

What the boundary is actually for

Grade boundaries are not set when the paper is written. They are set after almost every script in the country has been marked.

Ofqual’s own guidance says it plainly:

If an exam is easier than in previous years, the grade boundaries for that paper will be higher. If it is harder, the grade boundaries will be lower.

That is the whole mechanism. The boundary is how the exam board keeps a grade A in 2026 worth the same as a grade A in 2019, whatever this year’s papers turned out to be like.

So a boundary that goes up is telling you something about the paper. It is not telling you that you have to beat last year’s students.

We have written separately about what boundary movement means for your revision target, which is the part that actually affects your marks.

GCSE maths does the same thing. A grade 9 has ranged over 27 marks across its run. We have set that out in why GCSE maths grade boundaries are going up.

Further Maths is the one that does not quite follow the pattern. There the share getting a grade A really did step up, by five points since 2019, which is worth reading if you take it: why Further Maths grade boundaries are going up.

Every June series of this specification

A series with a cohort under a quarter of the largest here is greyed and left off the figure above, which names it: a few thousand candidates sitting a specification early is a fact about who sat it rather than about the standard. Each share is the students who got that grade itself, so the rows do not add up to the figure Pearson publishes, which counts everyone at that grade or above. An asterisk marks a year whose shares are Pearson's first published figures, which it revises later; the boundaries on that row are final. No summer exams were sat in 2020 or 2021, so there are no boundaries for those two years. The grades came from teacher assessment instead, which is why they are the two highest lines in the table. Boundaries are from Pearson's notional component documents and shares are from Pearson's grade statistics. Both are linked on the GCSE maths past papers page, series by series.

Read each pair of columns together. At grade A, the marks needed have ranged over 50 across these sittings and the share getting that grade has ranged over seven tenths of a point, from 24.0% to 24.7%. Each share in the table is the students who got that grade itself, so it reads 24.4% for a grade A this summer. The 41.5% quoted earlier counts everyone at an A or above, which is the figure Pearson publishes and the one the rails above plot.

The years that really did move

Look at 2020 and 2021. They are the two highest lines in the table, at 23.5% and 28.5% for an A*, against 16.3% in 2023.

They are also the two years with no summer exams. Grades came from teachers instead, and the autumn sittings that replaced the exams were tiny: 2,395 students in October 2020 against 79,068 this summer.

2022 is next, at 22.4%, and its boundaries were the lowest in the table. A grade A for 164 marks, a grade E for 28, which is 9% of the paper. That was the staging post on the way back to pre-pandemic grading, and by 2023 it was gone.

So the three biggest moves in the share of top grades came from how grades were awarded that year. None of them came from the papers getting harder.

The three papers do not move together

One more thing the per paper figures show, which the totals hide. Across these June sittings the A* boundary on a single paper has ranged from 70 to 89 out of 100.

June 2024 wanted 89 on Paper 3, the Statistics and Mechanics paper, and 81 on Paper 1. Whichever paper you have decided is the soft one, some series disagrees with you.

Your grade comes from the total across all three, so a weak paper can be rescued by a strong one. But it also means a paper you had written off as easy can quietly cost you a grade.

What to do with this

Stop using last year’s boundary as this year’s target. It describes last year’s papers. Yours have not been written into a boundary yet.

Aim above the top of the recent range, not at the middle of it. Across the six normal sittings since 2019 the grade A boundary has run from 164 to 214 out of 300, and this summer it was 210. Train for 214 and a hard paper cannot take the grade off you.

Do not read a high boundary as bad news. A high boundary usually means an accessible paper, which is the paper you want. It also means marks are cheaper to lose, so the careless ones cost more.

Every series, paper by paper, with its boundaries and its outcomes printed beside them for both the A-Level and the AS, is on our A-Level maths past papers page. To turn your own mock marks into a realistic grade range, use the grade predictor.

The short version

Boundaries go up when the papers are easier and down when they are harder. They move so that the grade does not.

The share of students getting each grade barely changes whatever the boundary does, because that share is largely set in advance from what the year group did at GCSE. Forty five more marks this summer than in 2019 bought nine tenths of a percentage point.

So the number to beat is not last year’s boundary. It is the best mark you are capable of putting on the paper.

---

Figures in this article come from Pearson’s notional component grade boundaries and Pearson’s grade statistics for 9MA0, both published after each series. The quotation is from Ofqual and the Department for Education’s guidance, GCSE and A level grading: what you need to know, and the 2022 and 2023 grading policy is set out in Ofqual’s approach to grading in summer 2022. The National Reference Test is described in Ofqual’s National Reference Test annual statement 2026.