115 papers and mark schemes from AQA, Edexcel and OCR, straight from the exam boards.
M marks pay for method, A marks for the accuracy that follows from it. An A mark is almost always conditional on the M mark before it, so a bare answer with no working has nothing to attach to. On a six-mark question, four of those marks are usually for the method.
A1ft means you can still earn the mark using a wrong value from earlier, as long as everything after it stays consistent. An early slip normally costs one mark, not the question. What loses the rest is quietly switching back to the right value halfway through.
Edexcel’s Section A assumes you have handled the current set: what the variables are, which are qualitative, what the gaps mean. Marks go missing because the question looks easy and students answer from intuition instead of the data. An afternoon with the spreadsheet is the cheapest set of marks on the paper.
Exhaustion, deduction, contradiction and counter-example each have a fixed shape. Contradiction opens by assuming the opposite, in words. A counter-example needs the closing sentence saying it disproves the claim, which is often a mark and often missing. Stuck? Write the opening line anyway.
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