A Level marking system explained: How does it work and what are the grade boundaries - as 2025 exams looms

• The 2025 A Level exam season is now almost here
• Once it finished in late June, there’s an almost two-month wait until results are out
• There are six different passing grades students can earn
• Depending on grade boundaries, this can sometimes mean you only need to score 20-30% of possible marks to pass

Sixth form students sitting their A Levels are now in their final days of cramming and practice tests.

The 2024/25 school year’s exam season will shortly get underway, with A levels specifically beginning the week of May 12. A - or ‘advanced’ - level qualifications are typically the very last ones learners sit in your secondary school career, and while it’s not the be all and end all, how they do can have a big impact on what comes next.

After exams end in late June, they will face an all-too-often anxious wait until results day to find out - as well as discovering which universities will offer them a place. But what different grades can they get, what do they actually mean, and how much will they need to score to get the grade you want?

Here’s everything you need to know:

How are A Levels marked, and what are the different grades?

Ofqual, the government’s qualifications regulator, says the completed A level exams will now be sent off for marking. This may be done by one person or several, online or on paper, depending on what the awarding organisation chooses - but their marking will be quality checked every step of the way. If your exam involved a performance or other type of assessment, this may be graded by your teacher - in line with official standards.

At this stage, marks will be made up of however many points you scored out of a total. Once all exams are marked, the awarding organisation will then decide how many marks are needed for each grade.

On each A level exam, you’ll receive a grade based on how many points you scored. There are six passing grades: A*, A, B, C, D and E. A* is the highest, and is usually reserved for students who scored 75-85% of all possible marks in their exam.

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E, on the other hand, is the lowest passing grade possible, with last year’s grade boundaries showing this grade can be sometimes be achieved by scoring as little as 20% of the available points. However, all of these grades still mean you have passed your A Level in that subject.

If you have not scored enough marks to pass with at least an E, your results with usually be marked with ‘not classified’, or even a ‘U’ - short for unclassified - depending on your awarding organisation.

What are the grade boundaries this year?

This year’s grade boundaries - or the minimum amount of marks you need to receive a certain grade - will unfortunately not be released until results day. These are actually set once all marking is completed, so that how difficult students found a particular paper can be taken into account, AQA says.

But there is a good chance they will be fairly similar to 2024’s grade boundaries. Here are a few of the most popular subjects as an example.

To get the top mark in each board’s standard advanced mathematics exam - an A* - you needed to score 86.3% of all possible marks for AQA; 72% for OCR; and 83.7% for Pearson Edexcel. But to pass those same maths papers with an E, the lowest passing grade, you’d need to get 24.3% of possible marks for AQA; 14.7% for OCR; and 18.7% for Pearson Edexcel.

Looking at a paper from the second most popular A Level subject last year, psychology, to get an A* you’d need 78.4% of all marks for AQA; 76.3% for OCR; and 58.9% for Pearson. To scrape by with an E, you’d need 22.2% at AQA; 27.7% at OCR; and 17.4% for Pearson.

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