Hiya, me again!
So I’ve read the Examiners Report from the Summer 2026 Edexcel Higher paper 2 and it is packed with golden nuggets!
First off, let’s celebrate a massive win, in that students showed incredible resilience … evidenced by there being very few blank responses, even right at the very end of the paper. This really is a testament to all the hard work happening in classrooms up and down the country to build exam confidence or maybe it’s just all the nagging that goes on!
Accuracy was generally good, and premature rounding wasn’t as big an issue in this paper, however, the examiners did highlight a frustrating trend with students miscopying numbers … they are either miscopying from the question paper into their working, within their own calculations, or straight onto the answer line. A bit of deliberate practice on checking transcription could save some serious marks.
So … here’s my breakdown:
The Good News!
- Students made a confident start to the paper … LCM/HCF using factor trees in particular was very well done. Expanding linear brackets and solving linear equations with variables on both sides also saw some excellent, clear algebraic working.
- The early problem-solving questions (there was a bead ratio Q and standard form … my students hated this question if I’m honest!) were absolute mark-earners for many. It was also brilliant to see that graph transformations was answered surprisingly well for a topic that appears so late in the paper.
What Caught Them Out …
- Compound Interest … this question had a twist in that there was a re-investment after the initial period. A painful number of students simply didn’t read the full question and missed out on the final two marks. Others muddled the formula entirely, putting percentages or incorrect multipliers inside the brackets.
- *WARNING* … I’M GOING TO BE CONTENTIOUS … There was an error interval question that was appalling in how marks were awarded … in my opinion (I was persuaded by Seager that this is the case having been a bit unbothered by it!) . You only need to look at the “skills map” on this one and the performance was really poor and whilst I know that it was examining a specific assessment objective it was just a sh1te question. Basically, students could write down what the answer should have been and weren’t rewarded for it … because the students needed to explicitly state what is wrong with the method. The fact that they were showing what should have been done was irrelevant apparently … I get it all the AO’s need to be assessed but this was rubbish … please just don’t do it again!
- Solving inequalities: Lots of students successfully solved the double-sided inequality but then stopped … they completely forgot to read the final sentence of the prompt asking them to actually list the integer values.
Some other things worth noting …
The examiners made some suggestions in this report where students could tighten up their exam technique:
1. Scaffold with Diagrams
There was a probability question, where the scaffolding of a tree diagram was not included … some students who drew their own often struggled to label the probabilities correctly and so in the same way that we may explicitly teach designing frequency trees or two way tables from scratch we need to ensure students are practiced in building and labelling their own probability trees from scratch rather than relying on a pre-drawn template.
2. Use the Required Method
One of the questions specifically demanded a “vector method” and the examiners noted that several students tried using similar triangles instead. No matter how clever the alternative geometry is, if the question specifies a method, students must use it to get the marks. DOH!
3. Substitute Before Rearranging
Another question involved using trigonometry and the cosine rule and rearranging the cosine rule to find a missing angle is notoriously tricky under exam pressure. The examiners explicitly recommended that students should substitute their known lengths into the formula before attempting to rearrange it and this almost guarantees they bag the method mark early.
4. Check the Final Form
On the very final question involving pressure and surds, several high-achieving students lost the final accuracy mark simply because they left their answer in the wrong algebraic format. Remind your students to always cast their eyes back to the final line of the question to check if a specific form is required.
There … I read that Sh!t so you didn’t have to …
Paper 3’s coming soon and then AQA I’ve got you on my radar!
Mel
