For GCSE exams in 2024, Ofqual issued a directive to all awarding organisations (AOs) to lower their higher grade boundaries to enable more students to achieve higher grades. This has resulted in all exam boards awarding an additional 3% of students a grade 9 compared with 2023. AQA awarded 10.1% of students a grade 9, Edexcel 9.6% and OCR 8%.
The best comparison year we have is 2023 where Ofqual directed exam boards to return to 2019 pre-lockdown standards following teacher/centre assessed grades in 2020 and 2021 and a leniant awarding year in 2022. Computer Science is more difficult to evaluate than other subjects because 2022 also saw the first assessment of new specifications and so there is no direct comparability to pre-2022 assessments.
The exam boards offered these specifications for assessment:
The expectation therefore, was that the percentage of students achieving higher grades would be higher than 2023. Grade boundaries for grades 9 – 7 in particular were expected to be lower in 2024 than 2023. Whilst 2019 was the last year where reliable data was available before the fallout from lockdowns, we have now been through 2023 awarding which provides a new set of reliable data that is also for the current specification. 2023 is therefore the best benchmark for comparing the number of students achieving each grade and future analysis from 2025 will no longer include 2018-2021 data.
Key findings are:
- as expected, more students achieved higher grades than in 2023
- a higher percentage of students achieved higher grades than in 2019
- growth of GCSE Computer Science entries was up again from 2023 to 2024
- Computer Science remains second from bottom (science double award is at bottom) for percentage of students achieving grades 4+
- Computer Science continues to be pretty much the median subject for number of entries
- Edexcel with its on-screen programming assessment had the largest growth of student entries at 21% for the second year in a row
- AQA had the highest grade boundaries and the highest number of students achieving the highest grades
- Edexcel had the widest differentiation between grade boundaries
- OCR still has the most entries but the lowest grades (no KS2 data available for comparison)
- OCR’s differentiation range has now improved
- Edexcel has the closest alignment between papers 1 and 2
This presentation shows a summary of the exam statistics in 2024 and compares them with 2023, looking at common misconceptions related to grade boundaries. It also It uses data and graphs from this interactive spreadsheet.
Edexcel was the only exam board to respond when presented with the analysis and have stated they are keen for their assessment team to use this analysis for continual improvement of their assessments, particularly in relation to the differentiation range.
Please note that the analysis used does not consider differences in baseline KS2 data for each exam board as this data is not publicly available. For example, a hypothesis could be made that more grammar schools and private schools use AQA which would naturally result in more students achieving higher grades with AQA, but this cannot be proved without KS2 data.