Grade 4 Exam Papers Free Download Maths
Joie Coffield
Kangourou sans Frontières (KSF) is an independent association, whose purpose is to organise the annual Kangaroo contest with the aim of promoting mathematics among young people around the world. Each year over six million school pupils aged 5 to 18 from more than 50 countries throughout the world take part at various levels. Awards are given to the top scoring students per grade at the national level. We decide to provide here a collections of past papers and solutions for those who wish to practice the math problems.
Question papers, mark schemes and examiner reports for the most recent exam sessions (within the last 12 months) can be accessed only by registered centres. If you don't have an Edexcel Online account, please contact your Exams Officer.
Please note that past papers from the October and November 2020 examination series have summer dates on them. This is because the assessment material was reused from the cancelled summer 2020 examination series.
Remember that you are going to spend two years studying this subject so make sure you like what you're doing and have confidence of doing well in the subject in your IB exams. Your performance and attitude in studying maths, and your individual strengths or weaknesses in individual components that may lead you to choose one course or another. If you are one of those all-rounders in maths, then perhaps you could choose based on university plans (see university recognition section further down). If you are not confident in maths skills but still want to pursue maths-related degrees, it is also an important factor to consider.
Grades range from 7 to 1, with 7 being the highest. The grade boundaries change every year depending on what the scores are (how the students do and how difficult they found the papers overall) and they also change for every timezone. The following are a rough guide and what students should aim for in order should be 'safe'.
IB papers have different time zones to stop students from one time zone sharing the contents of their papers with the next time zone. There are two time zones for the May papers (time zone 1 and time zone 2) and one time zone for the November papers (time zone 0 only). Time zone 1 (TZ1) is the Americas, and time zone 2 (TZ2) is the rest of the world (Africa/Europe/Middle East/Asia). Time zone 0 (TZ0) is for when there isn't such a big demand and there aren't enough people taking the exam to warrant two separate exams November exams are mainly for re-take students (although some schools sit their exams in November rather than May) and hence only one time zone is necessary. There is a common misconception that November exams are more difficult. Although the exams may sometimes be harder, the grade boundaries reflect this.
Produced by the Scotch (later 'Scottish') Education Department, these exam papers show how education developed in Scotland over this period, with a growing choice of subjects. Comparing them with current exam papers, there are obvious differences in the content and standards of the questions, and also in the layout and use of language.
The transition to the new GCSEs was generally smooth. In maths, schools appear to have made appropriate tier entry choices for their students: there were fewer students this summer who were ungraded on the higher tier and no students scoring full marks on the foundation tier.
If there were more marks targeted at grade 4, grade boundaries might be higher, but exam boards would be criticised for making their papers too easy, and it would mean fewer marks available to differentiate the very good students at the top end.
As schools and colleges become familiar with the new assessments, we might expect performance to improve slightly. And of course, grade boundaries will be set each year to reflect the difficulty of the papers. But we should not expect to get to a position where students have to score 50% of the marks to achieve a grade 4 on a higher tier paper, unless we redesign the papers to include many more questions targeted at grade 4.
Given that around 75% was enough to give students the new 'superstar' grade 9 and around 55% enough to get a grade 7 (equivalent to the old A grade) it seems possible to make the papers slightly more accessible whilst still leaving plenty of space for the most able to showcase their abilities on the exam paper.
Mt preferred option - as a maths teacher - would be to return to the days of 3 tiers so that students awarded grades 4/5/6 had to genuinely show mastery of some more complex topics to get those sorts of grades.
If students are capable of achieving full marks on the foundation tier papers, they should probably be entered for higher tier. In maths in summer 2017 there were no students who scored full marks on the foundation tier.
Foundation Tier is now best for many pupils, specially borderline ones where previously C was the goal but it was hard to decide which tier gave them the advantage. The title Foundation puts off many pupils and their parents who think they are doing very simple maths. It should be changed to a more appealing name such as Essential or Standard Maths, specially now the content has increased.
Higher Level should be just that,
namely to suit higher achievers . The difficulty at present is trying to be very broad in scope in the exam and span 4 to 9, resulting in 4 achieved at 20 per cent, or less, which frankly sounds odd.
The best way forward is to make a standard exam of two papers for EVERYONE , spanning 1 to 5 or even 6.It could be called Essential or Standard Maths. Then those capable and aspiring to a higher grade can sit one extra paper targeted at 6 to 9.Their result from the 3 papers combine for a final grade. A high grade such as 8 or 9 would then be far more meaningful than under the present arrangement.
This is very much like a driving test where everyone has to pass the basic one . Anyone wishing to go beyond takes an advanced course. With some tweaking this might be a way forward to remove perceived anomalies.
There seems more emphasis on content and not enough on depth and interlinking various skills. ThIs weakness immediately becomes apparent when grade 7,8 or even 9 pupils move on to A Level as they only know topics in isolation and their application in limited cases . Interestingly, in places where pupils excel in maths, the stress is to "think like a mathematician" rather than cover miles of content a few inches deep. Ask the best A Level pupils when the hour and minute hand on a clock face coincide or what compounded yearly % increase equates to a 20% increase over 5 years and few will think it out. The present exam is more stretching for many pupils and that is welcome but they need more back up in their earlier years so they can be well prepared for it. For the best pupils more of the really hard questions are needed throughout their course and in the exam to make a top grade truly stand out.
A major problem with the current system is the wide range of difficulty that is necessary on both papers, but particularly the higher. A student who may be striving for a grade 6 is faced with a paper where approximately 50% of the questions are likely to be inaccessible to them which surely cannot be a good experience. A much better system would be a return to three differentiated papers ( like the old higher, intermediate and Foundation) that target grades 7-9, 4-6 and 1-4. And only two papers instead of 3. Same amount of marking but a better experience for students I would say.
Are the grades awarded across different exam boards moderated? If a limited number of high achieving schools select a board that is harder this will affect standard distribution. Making it more difficult to get higher grades for that board.
In its later years, O-Levels were graded on a scale from A to E, with a U (ungraded) grade below that. Before 1975, the grading scheme varied between examination boards, but typically there were "pass" grades of 1 to 6 and "fail" grades of 7 to 9. However, the grades were not displayed on certificates.
GCSEs were introduced in September 1986[4] to establish a national qualification for those who decided to leave school at 16, without pursuing further academic study towards qualifications such as A-Levels or university degrees. The first GCSE exams were sat in 1987.[5] They replaced the former CSE and O-Level qualifications, uniting the two qualifications to allow access to the full range of grades for more students. However, the exam papers of the GCSE sometimes had a choice of questions, designed for the more able and the less able candidates.
Initially, the mathematics papers were set in three tiers: Higher; Intermediate; and Foundation, to cover different mathematical abilities. The Higher level corresponded to grades A-C; the Intermediate level corresponded to grades C-E; and the Foundation level corresponded to grades E-G. However, it was later realised that nobody who sat the Foundation level had any chance of passing the subject at grade C, so this arrangement was replaced by a two-tier arrangement where the Intermediate and Foundation levels were merged. This brought the subject into line with other subjects that typically had foundation and higher level papers. This meant that somebody who sat the new Foundation level could now achieve a grade C, which was considered the formal pass level.
The tiering of qualifications allows a subset of grades to be reached in a specific tier's paper. Formerly, many subjects were tiered, but with the mid-2010s reform, the number of tiered subjects reduced dramatically, including the removal of tiering from the GCSE English specifications. Untiered papers allow any grade to be achieved. Coursework and controlled assessment tasks are always untiered.
Infrequently, X and Q grades are awarded. X indicates that a course was not completed in full, and therefore an appropriate grade cannot be calculated. The Q (query) grade is a temporary grade that requires the school to contact the examining body. These latter two grades are both usually provisional, and are replaced with a regular grade once any issues have been resolved. X grades are also sometimes used for other purposes, on rare occasions, such as to indicate that an examiner found offensive material or hate speech within a student's responses. In some cases, this may lead to the student losing all marks for that paper or course. These grades are most common in subjects which discuss ethical issues, such as biology, religious studies, and citizenship.
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