Mathematics

AQA A-Level Mathematics (7357) covers the content prescribed by the Department for Education, so the syllabus itself is common to every board: roughly two thirds Pure Mathematics, with Statistics and Mechanics making up the rest. AQA assesses it across three equally weighted two-hour papers — Paper 1 is Pure only, Paper 2 combines Pure with Mechanics, and Paper 3 combines Pure with Statistics.

The jump from GCSE is the largest of any A-Level subject and it catches out students who arrived with a grade 7 or 8. The difficulty is not new topics so much as the expectation of sustained algebraic manipulation without prompting, and of setting out a proof or a modelling argument in full. Students are also assessed on a large statistical data set, which AQA expects them to have handled themselves rather than merely read about.