What gcse boards are there

There are several examination boards also known as awarding bodies that are able to set and award qualifications, such as GCSEs and A levels, to pupils in state schools and colleges across the UK. All exam boards follow strict guidelines from Ofqual the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation to regulate standards and ensure parity, but the layout, content and format of exams varies from board to board.

Schools and colleges, therefore, have a choice of which exam board they will use for each subject, and must look carefully at each specification to decide which awarding body and qualification they will choose. Decisions can be based on the number of papers, weightings of units and ratios of written exams to non-exam assessment, as well as on specific content covered by the course.

Find in-depth guides to the major exam boards in the links below, or read on for an overview:. AQA is a registered charity, independent of the government, and is managed by a board of trustees who have responsibility for the overall strategy and direction of the organisation.

In total, AQA offers qualifications in around 60 subjects and within these subject areas there are a variety of specifications and qualification levels. The core subjects of maths, English and science are covered, as well as numerous languages, humanities, ICT-related areas, PE and creative subjects. AQA also offers Applied General and Level 1, 2 and 3 qualifications in a variety of skills-based subject areas such as business, science, catering, and general skills, as well as independent extended projects.

Although it was initially established as a charitable organisation, Edexcel is now owned by Pearson and is the only privately owned exam board in the UK. AQA is run as an educational charity.

OCR is now the only major exam board owned by a university and is still run by the University of Cambridge, through its Cambridge Assessment division. Cambridge Assessment also controls CIE, a predominately international exam board. CIE started offering some qualifications to English, Welsh and Northern Irish state schools in , though it later withdrew from this market when the reformed GCSEs and A Levels examined onwards were introduced.

Though it originally ran as an educational charity like AQA, the Foundation was taken over by Pearson in and renamed simply Edexcel , making it the only British exam board to be run by a profit-making company. Cambridge Assessment International Education CAIE informally known as simply Cambridge and formerly known as CIE, Cambridge International Examinations is a provider of international qualifications, offering examinations and qualifications to 10, schools in more than countries.

In addition, Cambridge provides Key Stage examinations for primary and secondary schools internationally. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at info wingu-academy. You may find that even font type and presentation could influence your students perception of the papers, as illustrated in the example questions below.

AQA provides lines for students to show working on whilst Edexcel and OCR provide an open space, unless students are expected to write a sentence of two as part of a response, in which case lines will also be given. AQA has around five multiple choice, 1 mark questions at the start and part way through the paper.

This makes the questions accessible for all students to provide an answer, but you will need to prepare your students to make informed choices. AQA includes questions where students must select an option by ticking a box before being prompted to provide a reason on a clearly indicated set of lines. OCR have these questions too and will often give short sentence prompts within the answer space to start students off.

Edexcel have similar questions, but it will be stated that students must give reasons or show each stage of their working within the body of the text. This allows you to create a bespoke scheme of work using resources provided for the specification, which has been broken down into statements and mapped to individual teaching resources.

Once developed online, they are saved online for future adaptations and can be exported to Microsoft Word. Edexcel provides a series of schemes of work, including an interactive scheme of work which covers 1-, 2-, 3- or 5-year teaching, Key Stage 3 to Key Stage 4 transition and low attainers support.

Each exam board offers support with resources in a variety of ways. They each have a website and subscriber platform where these can be accessed. Below is a list of resources provided free of charge by each exam board, as indicated on their websites. Edexcel provide exam practise support by presenting their questions in a variety of ways, such as by theme and levels of scaffolding, as seen in their gold, silver and bronze papers.

These are great for easing teacher workload. Shadow papers are particularly helpful when you wish to reassess students or to provide them with a paper which is the same as a past exam but with different numbers. Though there may be a cost for some of the more intensive in-person training and workshops, much of the support provided by the exam boards to schools following their syllabus is free.

Grade boundaries and final grades will differ for each exam series depending on analysis of how students have performed on the papers. Below is a comparison of the percentage of marks required for each grade on the series of papers that were sat in summer , the most recent summer exam series due to the cancellation of exams last year as an effect of the pandemic and subsequent lockdown.

Percentages in red show where a grade boundary has reduced in and a percentage in green shows where it has increased from For the foundation tier, it shows that OCR has lower grade boundaries.

For the higher tier, Edexcel has lower grade boundaries up to Grade 6 in , but it is similar across all three boards in In , it is notable that Edexcel reduced their boundaries for the majority of grades while they increased for AQA foundation and OCR higher tier.

In Maths, Pearson Edexcel is the most popular of the boards. However, past students have mentioned that the AQA exam seems to have easier questions to answer as there is less problem solving involved to find a final solution. The questions are in a different structure as well, with several parts to each question giving candidates more hints as to the technique needed to find a final answer, so more marks are awarded.

For science, although only an exceedingly small part of the country uses it, OCR Gateway has been dubbed the easiest exam to take, although this does mean that the grade boundaries are often extremely high. The boards with the toughest science questions are both AQA and Edexcel, although there are few schools in the UK who enter students for the Edexcel course.

According to students who have taken examinations with the board previously, the amount of writing required in the time limit of the exam can be difficult to cope with. This is countered by the fact the grade boundaries are reasonable, and an occasional easy mark on top of this makes passing achievable.

The main reason for this is that the questions on any iGCSE paper are designed to be accessible for all students living internationally. Therefore, the English paper just for students in the UK does not provide as many easy marks, making the paper that little bit harder. That said, these UK-based exam boards are also allow the top grades for less marks, so students with better ability find that taking a regular GCSE is more rewarding.

There are a versatile range of language subjects available at GCSE, all of which have slightly different exam structures. Generally, the easiest exam board for languages is AQA, as students have said that the listening exams for this are much simpler to understand as half of the paper is answered in English, and the speaking exam requires fewer answers to be learnt than for other boards.

Within this, there are less papers to be sat than AQA, but the time given is shorter. The questions are more difficult, expecting candidates to understand complex structures which may not necessarily have been taught, and more content needs to be learnt, including speaking questions and long vocab lists. People who have worked hard and learnt the content find Edexcel relatively easy because there are no problem-solving questions, so your ability to reach a high grade is purely based on your personal motivation.

In performing arts subjects like Music and Drama, AQA is the most popular exam board across the UK, as it has the easiest structure for teachers to follow and the board releases lots of resources to help students study.