I’m obsessed with helping students get top grades. That makes me a fellow traveller with 3 of these organisations - see image below.

AQA sets grade 9 at 75%, lower than any other exam board.

They almost never use the top 20% of the mark range, because they hate awarding top grades. 2.9% of English students get grade 9, while 3.2% of maths and 4.5% of science do so. The pattern is similar at grade 7+.

Why the disparity? Because 75% of students are forced to sit AQA English language.

13% of remarks result in higher grades with AQA. 31% with Edexcel. You could construe this as proof that AQA make far fewer mistakes.

But Ofqual disagrees. Their analysis of exam marking shows a GCSE English answer is awarded the correct grade only 50% of the time. When 75% of those candidates take AQA, the facts speak for themselves.

I sat the GCSE again in November and scored 140/160, a mark in the top 0.01% nationally. I paid for a remark, because it was still wrong, and went up to 143. I paid for an appeal and AQA said words to the effect of, ‘are you kidding, you’re way over the grade boundary, so you can’t claim your mark is ‘unreasonable’. An answer can be perfect at 16 marks, but it is not unreasonable to give it 15 or 14 (even though 3 marks is more than a grade different). PS, you answered question 3 like an idiot.’

Who decides what unreasonable is? Well, AQA, obviously.