A Level results day 2025: What were this year's grade boundaries? The exact marks needed to get top grades
There’s nothing quite so disappointing as missing out on a higher grade by just a few marks 🙃
- Today is A Level results day, with top grades and the overall pass rate both up this year
- Grade boundaries are also released on results day
- Students can use these to calculate how close they were to a higher grade
- But the exact amount of marks needed for each grade will vary by both subject and exam board
A few stray marks here or there can end up making a big difference when it comes to final A Level grades.
This Thursday (August 14) is A Levels results day, with hundreds of thousands of students across the country finding out how they did on their exams. Many will also be bidding their secondary school years adieu, and welcoming whatever comes next as they celebrate the culmination of years of hard graft.
Some students might also be curious to know how close they were to getting a higher grade – especially if conditional university offers hang in the balance, or if they’re considering asking for a marking review. This is where grade boundaries can come into play.
Grade boundaries are the exact amount of marks a student needs to get each particular letter grade. These are set by an expert panel once all exams have been marked, so that whether students struggled can be taken into account. Each exam board will then release their own list of grade boundaries for each subject on results day.
But what were some of the grade boundaries for this year’s most popular A Level subjects, and where can I find the rest? Here’s what you need to know:
The grade boundaries for top A Level subjects in 2025
Exam papers can differ somewhat depending on which exam board your school uses – usually AQA, OCR, Eduqas or Pearson Edexcel for most students in England – meaning that grade boundaries can too. To help, we’ve looked at what percentage of total marks available students needed to get for key grades in a couple of this year’s most popular subjects, across a few different exam boards.
Mathematics was this year’s top A Level, sat by more than 112 thousand learners. To get the very highest grade available – an A* – they had to earn at least 260 marks out of 300 in AQA’s advanced maths paper. This fell to 242 out of 300 for OCR’s ‘Mathematics A’ option; and sat at 258 out of 300 for Edexcel’s A Level mathematics option.
To get a B in these papers, you needed at least 183 marks for AQA, 163 for OCR, and 178 for Edexcel. To scrape by with the lowest passing grade – an E – you needed 71 marks for AQA, 64 for OCR, and 71 for Edexcel.
The second and third most popular papers were psychology and biology, so we’ve taken a look at them too. To get a top A* grade in psychology, you needed at least 222 marks out of 288 for AQA, 222 out of 300 for OCR, or 161 out of 270 for Edexcel.
To get a B, you needed a minimum of 163 marks for AQA, 168 for OCR, or 115 for Edexcel. But to pass with just an E, you needed just 60 marks for AQA, 73 for OCR, and 46 for Edexcel.
In biology (when taken as a pure science subject), students needed to earn at least 192 out of 260 marks for a top A* grade with AQA, 187 out of 270 in OCR’s ‘Biology A’ paper, and 225 out of 300 for Edexcel’s ‘Biology A’ paper. To get a B, you needed 139 marks for AQA, 137 for OCR, or 173 for Edexcel – while to land a passing E, you just need 63 marks for AQA, 67 for OCR, and 92 for Edexcel.
Where can I find the rest?
Each exam board has its own dedicated webpage for publishing grade boundaries, and they should now be updated with this year’s A Level ones. Here are links to the relevant pages for each awarding organisation:
While some students will have been given their exact marks alongside their grades in their results day envelopes, others may not have. For those wanting to know, you should be able to request these from either your school or the exam board – ask school staff to find out which.
Has your child received A Level results today, but are unsure what to do next? Here's our guide to navigating the Clearing process, and here are some expert mental health tips for students feeling stressed our anxious about the outcome.