This is the second post looking at the percentage of questions that were on both tiers in the first live sitting of the exam – part 1 included the stats from Pearson/Edexcels papers and this one is for OCR.

As previously, I should remind you that “at least 20%” on both tiers must be from common tasks that appear on both the higher and foundation tiers.

The initial analysis from OCR using the sample assessment materials and one set of practice papers showed: The lowest on any individual paper was 21% and the highest was 23% with an average of 21.67% across the papers I looked at. In addition to the fact that the questions were not sequential the other thing of note is that because the OCR papers are out of 100 there is a similar number of marks to the other boards and the percentage is a bit misleading.

In the first live sitting – I’ve shown the stats below – the percentage of marks available on the crossover questions is pretty consistent across the 3 papers and the mean average has come in at 24.33%  which is higher than the earlier analysis which showed 21.67% and also higher than the minimum set by the technical spec for the exam – but back in January Neil from OCR confirmed that their aim was to have 20-25 marks that are common on both tiers and they have come in very close to this intention. The other thing of note is that the questions now appear in the papers sequentially – that’s not to say that say Q 20 – 24 will appear as say, Q 2 to Q 6 i.e. they are not consecutive but do appear in the same order on the higher tier that they appear in the foundation tier papers which I think is a good move!