1 / 10

UMS explained!

UMS explained!. What are A-levels worth?. Most A-levels are made up of four units , with a grand total of 400 UMS marks available. Six-unit A-levels are out of 600 UMS marks T wo-unit A-levels are out of 200 UMS marks. The best way to understand UMS is with an example!.

fedmonson
Download Presentation

UMS explained!

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript


  1. UMS explained!

  2. What are A-levels worth? • Most A-levels are made up of four units, with a grand total of 400 UMS marks available. • Six-unit A-levels are out of 600 UMS marks • Two-unit A-levels are out of 200 UMS marks

  3. The best way to understand UMS is with an example! • Let's imagine a four-unit A-level, with the first unit (we'll call it Unit X) worth 30% of the qualification. • There are 400 UMS marks for the whole qualification (because it's a four-unit A-level), • So Unit X will be worth a maximum of 120 UMS marks (30% of 400). Don’t progress to the next slide if you don’t understand this!!

  4. For ALL A-levels… • Grade boundaries for UMS marks are fixed so that:A = 80% of the maximum UMSB = 70%C = 60%D = 50%E = 40%

  5. Lets continue with our example! • For Unit X, this means that our UMS grade boundaries are:A = 96 (80% of 120)B = 84 (70% of 120)C = 72 (60% of 120)D = 60 (50% of 120)E = 48 (40% of 120) UNDERSTOOD? If not go back two slides and start again!

  6. Let's say the Unit X exam is out of 80 marks. • These are called raw marks. • Once the exam has been taken by everyone, a committee at the exam board gathers to decide what the grade boundaries for this particular paper should be • They take into account for example how difficult it is compared to earlier versions of the Unit X exam Are you sure you understand?

  7. Unit X • For this exam, let's say the committee decides that the grade A boundary is 60 out of 80 and the grade E boundary is 36 out of 80 (remember, these are raw marks). • The other grade boundaries are spread evenly between these two points.

  8. We now convert the raw marks to UMS marks, because we know where the equivalent grade boundaries lie… • If you took the exam and got 60/80, this would give you 96 UMS, because 60 happens to be the raw mark grade A boundary set by the committee, and 96 is the uniform mark grade A boundary for this unit. • If you got 55/80, you would get 86 UMS (grade B). • If you got 45/80, you would get 66 UMS (grade D).

  9. Conclusions… • Because the raw marks are converted to UMS marks, it means different students' grades can be compared side by side, with a particular UMS (and ultimately grade) representing the same level of achievement no matter when the unit was taken.

  10. UMS conversion for different exam boards… • http://www.aqa.org.uk/exams-administration/about-results/uniform-mark-scale/convert-marks-to-ums • http://www.edexcel.com/i-am-a/student/results/Pages/Convert-your-marks.aspx • http://www.ocr.org.uk/Images/128199-a2-units-showing-90-percent-conversion-points-january-2013.pdf

More Related