How difficult was JZ Exam Set B?
Around 150 students sat each paper of JZ Exam Set B in the live mock on 20 September 2026. This gives us enough data to make a useful first estimate of its difficulty and implied grade boundaries.
All comparisons below use the estimated 2024+ TMUA scale shown on JZMaths. The purpose is not to claim an exact conversion to the current TMUA, but to give students a useful indication of how demanding Set B was.
Headline findings
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Set B vs TMUA 2023: about 4 marks harder.
This is the strongest comparison and is supported directly by JZMaths data. Comparable performances on Set B generally require around four fewer marks out of 40 than on TMUA 2023.
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2025 vs 2023: perhaps 1–2 marks harder.
This is only a rough contextual estimate. The 2025 papers and official raw-score conversion tables have not been publicly released.
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Set B vs 2025: perhaps 2–3 marks harder.
This is therefore also a rough estimate, but gives a useful indication of how Set B may compare with a recent TMUA paper.
Set B compared with TMUA 2023
TMUA 2023 is the most useful published benchmark for comparison with the more recent TMUA.
The strongest evidence comes from comparing TMUA 2023 and Set B within the JZMaths model, where both are placed on the same difficulty scale and reported using the same estimated 2024+ conversion. Three points across the range:
| On Set B | On TMUA 2023 | Estimated score |
|---|---|---|
| 23 / 40 | 28 / 40 | 5.9 |
| 26 / 40 | 30 / 40 | 6.5 |
| 28 / 40 | 32 / 40 | 7.1 |
The difference is not exactly four marks throughout the scale: it varies by score, generally from around three to five marks. However, about four marks out of 40 is a reasonable overall summary.
Students should therefore not interpret a raw Set B score in the same way as the same raw score on an official 2023 paper.
What about the 2025 TMUA?
The comparison with 2025 is necessarily much less certain because neither the papers nor official raw-score conversion tables have been released.
Available evidence suggests that 2023 is a useful benchmark for recent TMUA difficulty, with the 2025 papers probably somewhat more demanding. As a very rough guide, a similar level of performance in 2025 may have required around 1–2 fewer raw marks than in 2023.
If that estimate is approximately right, JZ Exam Set B would still appear to be around 2–3 marks more demanding than a typical 2025 paper.
These 2025 figures should be treated as guidance only, rather than as a calibrated conversion.
Important caveats
The Set B estimates are still based on a much smaller sample than the established official papers on JZMaths: around 150 responses per question rather than many hundreds.
The JZMaths model takes students' existing ability into account when estimating question difficulty, so the unusually strong live-mock cohort does not by itself prevent comparison with existing papers. The smaller sample does, however, mean that the precise boundaries have greater uncertainty and may move as more students complete the set.
The broad conclusion is more reliable than the exact numerical adjustment:
JZ Exam Set B was very demanding. The current evidence indicates that it is materially harder than TMUA 2023, and very likely somewhat harder than a typical recent TMUA paper.
— Joe Zhou