How do we assign difficulty?
What Easy, Medium, Hard and Very hard mean, and what sets them.
PointsGame
Some past-paper questions carry a label beside their title: Easy, Medium, Hard or Very hard. It tells you how much thinking a question asks for before you start, so you can pick the right one for the time you have.
For now only Higher Level Maths has them: all 651 questions. Other subjects show no label until they’re rated, rather than a guess.
Four levels
Each label means the work a complete, correct answer needs from a Higher Level student:
- Easy: recall or carry out a familiar method, with the method clear from the question.
- Medium: link standard steps, read a familiar graph or diagram, or follow a route the question gives you, carefully.
- Hard: choose the method, the representation or the cases yourself, or justify an answer beyond routine calculation.
- Very hard: find a real insight the question doesn’t point you to, or manage a long chain of modelling, proof or conditions where each step depends on the last.
The hardest part sets the label
A question is rated by its hardest part, not an average of its parts. A question that opens with an easy (a) and ends with a very hard (c) is Very hard, because that’s what you’ll meet if you do the whole thing.
What counts, and what doesn’t
Each rating comes from reading the question with its worked solution, and the marking scheme where it helps. What matters:
- how much you have to choose the method yourself,
- how many steps depend on each other,
- turning words, graphs or diagrams into maths,
- cases and conditions to keep track of,
- how much you have to justify, and
- how much the question itself leads you.
Length, marks, year, where the question sits on the paper and how many lines of working it takes don’t set the label. Nor do exam results: the labels are judgements of the work, not a measure of how students did.
No quotas
We didn’t decide in advance how many questions go in each level. Each question gets the label its work earns. Across Higher Maths that comes to 120 Easy, 277 Medium, 193 Hard and 61 Very hard.
A label is a guide, not a promise: a question you’ve practised will feel easier than its label, and one on a topic you haven’t covered will feel harder.