Very confusing

[matt john]

I'm going to start my cambridge a-levels soon. I've looked up on the past year papers and I don't understand something. Take biology for example. Why are there 3 different biology paper 2 per examination session? There is 9700/21 , 9700/22 and 9700/23. Please help, I'm new.

 

[CaptainDanger]

CIE
As part of CIE’s continual commitment to maintaining best practice in assessment, CIE has begun to use different variants of some question papers for our most popular assessments with extremely large and widespread candidature, The question papers are closely related and the relationships between them have been thoroughly established using our assessment expertise. All versions of the paper give assessment of equal standard.

The content assessed by the examination papers and the type of questions are unchanged.

This change means that for this component there are now two variant Question Papers, Mark Schemes and Principal Examiner’s Reports where previously there was only one. For any individual country, it is intended that only one variant is used.

 

[matt john]

How can the standard of the papers be the same if the questions in these papers are different? Won't it be unfair if different people sit for the different papers of different difficulties?

 

[walkanwine]

exactly lol

 

[PhyZac]

Don't worry, every paper, has its own grade threshold. And according how hard your paper was (not far in difficulty) you get your grade.

 

[A star]

I'm going to start my cambridge a-levels soon. I've looked up on the past year papers and I don't understand something. Take biology for example. Why are there 3 different biology paper 2 per examination session? There is 9700/21 , 9700/22 and 9700/23. Please help, I'm new.

yup each variant combo have varying thresholds. usualyy they vary by around 6 marks for As