Initial grade-boundary estimates for JZ Exam Set A

I have now published the initial grade-boundary estimates for JZ Exam Set A, based on students’ performance over the last few days. These are indicative estimates and will be updated as more students complete the papers.

I’m broadly happy with the difficulty, style and timing of this new set, which is designed to reflect the current TMUA. In many ways, I think it is better than my earlier JZ mocks, which I largely wrote back in February. I feel I’m getting better at setting questions the more I write! Every set in the beta will also be reviewed by both Jackie Tyler and me: one of us takes the lead as author, and the other provides an editorial review, bringing both our perspectives and experience to the papers.

For Set A, I’m going to come clean: at the eleventh hour, I took another look at Paper 2 and decided it might still be too hard 😂, so I replaced a few of the hardest questions with more reasonable ones. That probably made it ever so slightly easier than I had intended, but not by much. My own rough judgement was that it had been around 10–15% harder than the current TMUA; now, I’d put it perhaps 5% easier.

Paper 1 is slightly harder than I had intended, though students also tend to be stronger on that paper, so I think it's ok. We’ll continue to monitor the balance as we write more sets and see how you get on with them. The aim is to reflect the current TMUA’s difficulty and mix of questions as closely as possible.

In other news, development of the live mock system is complete, and I hope many of you will join us on Saturday! The live mock page will be updated tomorrow. All you need is to be signed up to PLUS beta, no separate registration is required. Just turn up at the scheduled time and click Start.