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AQA · OCR · Edexcel · Cambridge International
Where are your teen's marks actually going?
Nine questions. 30 minutes. Sat at home. We mark it by hand and send back exactly where the marks went, and the Three Fixes that would earn the most of them back.
It will not tell you a grade. Nothing that takes 30 minutes can.
Send me the paper
It arrives by email in a couple of minutes.
No charge, and nobody will call you unless you ask. We use your email to send the paper and the report.
You have watched the hours go in
The revision happened. Your teen says they understood it in the lesson. And the grade that comes back does not match either of those things.
The obvious conclusion is that something is missing from what they know. Often something else is going on, and it is both more common and more fixable.
At GCSE, "the mass of an atom compared to carbon" earns the mark. At A-Level it earns nothing, because the examiner is waiting for weighted mean. Same teen, same knowledge, different standard, and almost nobody tells them it changed.
Fewer than one in three A-Level Chemistry students finish with an A or A*. The step up from GCSE catches out a great many students who were comfortable a year ago.
The question worth asking
When your teen drops a mark, is it the kind that fixes itself?
Some are. A topic the class has not reached yet is no cause for concern. The teacher gets there and the gap closes on its own.
Some are not. If your teen understands the chemistry but writes an answer that stops short of what the examiner needed, nothing about that changes between now and June. It costs the same marks in the summer as it costs today, and covering more content will not touch it, because content was never what went wrong.
This paper is built to tell those two apart.
SEND ME THE PAPER
This is not our observation
After every exam series the boards publish a report on where candidates lost marks.
These are their words.
“most answers were not explicit enough to score the mark”
AQA · A-level Chemistry 7405/2 · June 2024
“too vague to score any mark”
Pearson Edexcel · A level Chemistry 9CH0/01 · June 2025
“some candidates lost marks as they referred to nuclear radius instead of atomic radius”
OCR · A Level Chemistry A H432/01 · Summer 2023
Not one of those is a gap in knowledge.
Every one of them is a student who knew the Chemistry and did not get the credit for it.
What your teen sits
Nine questions
30 marks, written by us rather than downloaded.
30 minutes
Timed, with a line drawn when the time is up.
At home, alone
No notes. A paper someone helped with tells us nothing.
Every question is set on content that AQA, OCR, Edexcel and Cambridge International all require in the first year, asked the way A-Level asks it.
The questions come in pairs. One asks your teen to recall something. Its partner asks them to use that same thing somewhere unfamiliar. That pairing is the whole instrument, and it is the reason a past paper cannot do this job: a past paper tells you how many marks they got, and this tells you why the rest went.
What it can show you
- Whether marks are going on Chemistry your teen can already explain
- Where their answers stop short of what the examiner needed
- Whether they run out of time before they run out of knowledge
What it cannot show you
- A grade. This is not an exam board paper, and 30 marks cannot produce one
- A prediction. We do not make them, for anybody
- A pass or a fail. There is no pass mark on this paper
If your teen scores 15 out of 30, that is not half a grade, or half a level, or half of anything. It is 15 marks. Where the other 15 went is the only interesting thing on the page.
What we send back
Marked by a person, against the conventions your teen's own exam board applies. Written in plain English: you do not need to be able to mark Chemistry yourself to use it.
Papers go through in weekly batches. Send yours back by Friday and the report comes the following week.
Where the marks went
Question by question, on your teen's own paper. Named, not summarised.
What it suggests
Whether marks went on content, on execution, or on the clock.
Three Fixes
The three changes that would have earned back the most marks on this paper.
This asks something of both of you
From your teen: 30 minutes, timed, with nothing open, on their own. A paper someone helped with tells us nothing useful.
From you: getting a sixteen-year-old to agree to sit it, and two photographs sent back afterwards. The first of those is usually the harder one.
If that sounds like a lot to ask, it is. It is also the reason the report is worth reading when it arrives.
One question worth asking anybody
Every group tutoring programme advertising alongside this one will show you results. The question that separates them is who they let in.
A programme that only accepts students already on track for an A will produce a great many A grades without having changed one thing about any of them. It is worth asking, of us as much as of them.
Find out where the marks are going
Nine questions, 30 minutes, and a report that names every mark your teen lost and why.
No charge, and nothing to buy.