Edexcel vs AQA vs OCR: does the exam board matter?

The short answer is no — not in the way most people mean it. There is no easy board and no hard board, the content is set by the Department for Education and is the same everywhere, and the grade boundaries are set after every script has been marked precisely so that an A on one board means what an A means on another. What does differ is how each board carves the applied maths up across the three papers, and that changes how you should revise. It also means the one thing that genuinely matters here is practising your own board's papers and nobody else's.

What is identical, and it is nearly everything

Every A-Level Maths specification in England teaches the same subject content, mandated centrally. Every one is assessed against the same three assessment objectives — AQA's own specification says outright that the assessment objectives "are set by Ofqual and are the same across all A-level Mathematics specifications and all exam boards", weighted 50% AO1 for standard techniques, 25% AO2 for reasoning and proof, 25% AO3 for problem solving.

The shape of the exam is the same too. Edexcel, AQA and OCR A all sit three written papers of two hours and 100 marks each, worth a third of the qualification apiece, out of 300 in total. No coursework, no optional modules, nothing to choose. A student moving school between Year 12 and Year 13 and switching boards would lose almost nothing of what they had learned.

So when someone tells you a board is easier, ask what they think easier means. If the questions were gentler, the boundaries would rise to compensate; if the boundaries are lower, it is because the questions were harder. The system is built to make that trade cancel out.

The one structural difference worth knowing

Where the boards genuinely part company is the arrangement of statistics and mechanics. Edexcel puts all of it in one place. Papers 1 and 2 are pure mathematics, and Paper 3 is Statistics and Mechanics, split into two sections of 50 marks. Two-thirds of the exam is pure, and every applied mark you will ever earn is earned in a single two-hour sitting.

AQA spreads it. Paper 1 is pure only; Paper 2 is pure plus mechanics; Paper 3 is pure plus statistics. OCR's A specification does the same thing in the other order — Paper 1 pure, Paper 2 pure and statistics, Paper 3 pure and mechanics. OCR's MEI specification goes further still, pairing mechanics with pure in Paper 1 and statistics with pure in Paper 2, then finishing with a comprehension paper built around an article you read in the exam.

That is not a difficulty difference, but it is a real revision difference. On Edexcel, a student who has quietly given up on mechanics has one bad morning and can still bank two strong pure papers; the same student on AQA or OCR carries that weakness into two papers out of three. Conversely, there is nowhere to hide on Edexcel's Paper 3, because none of the pure fluency that carried the first two is on the table. I plan revision differently for the two shapes, and differently again for whichever of statistics and mechanics the student has been quietly avoiding.

What this summer's boundaries actually show

Here are the June 2026 A-level boundaries, published in August. Edexcel's 9MA0, out of 300: 254 for an A*, 210 for an A, 173 for a B, 136 for a C. AQA's 7357, also out of 300: 260, 219, 182, 145. OCR's H240, out of 300: 250, 208, 172, 136. OCR MEI's H640 is marked out of 275, where an A* took 223 and an A took 187.

As percentages, an A* ran from 81% on MEI to 87% on AQA, and an A from 68% to 73%. That is a five-point spread, and it is the residue of one year's papers being marginally harder or easier than another's — not evidence about the boards. Look at any board across three consecutive years and you will see movement of a similar size within that board alone.

The practical consequence is the one that matters for revision planning: you cannot revise towards a percentage, because the percentage is not decided until after you have sat the paper. What you can do is work with your own board's published boundaries from previous series when you mark a practice paper, so that a raw total means something. I go into how to do that properly in the piece on the right and wrong ways to use past papers.

The differences that do bite

Two board-specific things can cost real marks, and neither is about difficulty.

The first is the large data set. Each board prescribes its own — Edexcel's is weather data from the Met Office, and the others set their own sources, with MEI rotating through several on a cycle — and the statistics questions are written on the assumption that you have spent time inside that particular data. You cannot take it into the exam, and you cannot get familiar with it by looking at another board's. This is the single most board-specific thing in the whole qualification, and it is also the thing students most often skip.

The second is question style, and here I am giving you an opinion rather than a fact. Having marked a lot of practice papers across all three, my sense is that Edexcel questions tend to be longer and more scaffolded, OCR's shorter and more direct, and AQA's somewhere between, with a fondness for asking you to comment on a statement rather than just compute. It is a matter of familiarity, not hardness — and familiarity is exactly what practising the right papers buys you.

You do not get to choose it anyway

Almost every conversation I have about boards is about something the family cannot control. Your school or college picks the board, usually department-wide and years in advance, and usually for reasons of textbooks, staff experience and continuity rather than anything to do with your child. Nobody moves school over an exam board, and nobody should.

The one group with a genuine choice is private candidates, and even then it is usually made for them by whichever exam centre takes the entry. If that is your situation, settle the board question on day one rather than in March; I have written up the logistics of sitting the A-Level privately in full.

What to do with all this

Find out which board and which specification code you are on, and write it down. Ask your teacher, or look at the front of the textbook. I ask every new student, and I would say a third of Year 13s cannot answer in October. The code matters as much as the board: OCR runs two different A-Level Maths specifications, and papers from one are of limited use if you are sitting the other.

Then use that board's material and only that board's. Every board's papers are free and legal to download, and they are all on this site: Edexcel, AQA, OCR A and OCR MEI. Work through them in the order the boundaries suggest, and keep the published boundaries beside you when you mark.

One useful exception: once you have exhausted your own board's back catalogue late in Year 13, other boards' pure papers are perfectly good practice. The pure content is identical, so a hard AQA integration question is a hard integration question whoever set it. Just not instead of your own board's papers, and not at all with the statistics.

If you are at the start of Year 12 and this is the first you have heard of any of it, that is normal and it is not urgent — the first fortnight of the course has bigger things in it. Find out the board by half-term and you have lost nothing.