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Our registered address is AQA, Devas Street, Manchester M15 6EX.  \nAQA Education (AQA) is a registered charity (number 1073334) and a company limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales (number 3644723) . Our registered address is AQA, Devas Street, Manchester M15 6EX.  \n2 of 12  \nTiering choices  \nHow common questions can support your decisions  \nGuest blog on [bettermaths.aqa.org.uk: Fay Sheppard](bettermaths.aqa.org.uk: Fay Sheppard), United Learning  \nJanuary 22, 2018  \nOne of the main challenges of the new GCSE was deciding which tier to enter students into. Looking at the results of the summer 2017 exams suggests that teachers made the right choice between Foundation and Higher for the vast majority of students, but even in the second year of the new specification, the decision is still a tough one for many teachers.  \nIn this guest blog, Fay Sheppard, Director of Maths for United Learning, shares her approach of using performance on common questions to help inform tiering decisions, and also explains how common question tests can be used to support students.  \nCommon questions and how you can use them  \nAs Director of Maths for a group of schools across England, a big part of my role in 2016/17 was providing guidance on delivering the new GCSE, securing positive outcomes in the 5+ measure: a key part of that was making sure students were entered for the right tier for them. One area that I’m convinced supported these decisions was the use of common questions.  \nCommon questions are the questions that appear on both the Foundation and Higher Tier papers of an exam series. They address the ‘standard’ or ‘underlined’ specification content, but not the‘bold’ specification content. Ofqual requires that common questions account for at least 20% of the marks available on each paper. Across the three AQA papers from summer 2017, common questions accounted for 28% of the available marks (67/240) .  \nIn the schools I work with, we extracted these common questions from the exam papers and compiled them into mini-papers to set our students (allowing 20–30 minutes for completion, depending on the number of marks). AQA have compiled the common questions from their summer 2017 exam papers into three common questions tests.  \nBelow are a few examples to show how we use students’ performance on these mini-papers to inform the choice of which tier to enter them for.  \nAQA Education (AQA) is a registered charity (number 1073334) and a company limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales (number 3644723) . Our registered address is AQA, Devas Street, Manchester M15 6EX.  \n3 of 12  \nCase study: Using common questions to support tiering decisions  \nThe following worked examples are based on students’ results in mock exams in December 2017.(The students in Foundation have been following a hybrid course, focusing on ‘underlined’specification content.)  \nWe looked at how each student performed on the common questions, compared with the mean performance of students who achieved each grade in the AQA summer 2017 exam series. This data was provided by AQA and is summarised in the table below. For example, a grade 5 student on Foundation achieved nearly 55% on the common questions. We then worked out an indicative grade based on their performance on the common questions.  \nMean performance on common questions at each grade of the summer 2017 GCSE Maths exams. Source: AQA  \nAQA Education (AQA) is a registered charity (number 1073334) and a company limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales (number 3644723) . Our registered address is AQA, Devas Street, Manchester M15 6EX.  \n4 of 12  \nStudent A  \nTarget grade: 5  \nTier taken for mock exams: Foundation*  \nTotal marks in mock exams ","cbCaioBdJztdYL2p","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaioBdJztdYL2p","pdf",276164,12,"English","# Spring hub network meeting\n## Tier choices\n## Common questions and how you can use them\n## Case study: Using common questions to support tiering decisions","[{\"question\":\"What problem does the document address about GCSE Maths tiering?\",\"answer\":\"It addresses how to decide which GCSE Mathematics tier to enter students for, noting that the decision remains difficult for many teachers even in the second year of the new specification.\"},{\"question\":\"What are “common questions” and why are they important?\",\"answer\":\"Common questions appear on both Foundation and Higher tier papers and cover the “standard/underlined” specification content only. They are used because Ofqual requires them to account for at least 20% of marks on each paper, enabling meaningful comparisons.\"},{\"question\":\"How do the case studies use common-question results to recommend a tier?\",\"answer\":\"For each student, the document compares common-question performance from mock exams against grade means from the 2017 summer exam series, then derives an indicative grade and uses it—along with current attainment—to recommend either staying in Foundation or moving to Higher (or vice versa).\"}]","GCSE Maths Spring hub network meeting - Tier choices | PDF",1792468231]