Advance information – FAQs for teachers

GCSE, AS and A Level, Core Maths, FSMQ, Cambridge Nationals in Information Technologies

Advance information  has now been released and we wanted to answer some of the questions you have about it. It’s worth noting that not everything in this FAQ will apply to your subject but if you’re in any doubt, contact us and we’ll be happy to help.

Advanced information finder

What is advance information?

Advance information is intended to communicate in advance some of the aspects of the specification that will be assessed in the summer 2022 exam papers. (For full details, see the document published by JCQ.) In essence, advance information will provide the focus of aspects of the exam, such as:

• content
• contexts
• texts
• topics
• sub-topics
• themes
• skills etc.

This won’t be at a level that could lead to questions being predictable or enable students to prepare answers in advance. It will, though, help to direct revision to support the summer 2022 exams.

Why isn’t advance information the same across all subjects?

Advance information will look different across subjects for several reasons. The nature of the different specifications and assessments mean different approaches are needed. Within a subject it was important to ensure that the amount of information released was comparable between different exam boards’ qualifications.

While advance information for some subject areas will cover all examined components, they will not necessarily cover everything within the exam itself. In many subjects, questions in the exam will require students to draw upon knowledge not listed in the advance information. This is often the case for questions that are low tariff (mark) and synoptic (questions drawing different areas of knowledge, skills and/or understanding from across a course). The advance information will highlight where this is the case.

It is important, therefore, that students have a good understanding of all the specification content across all their subjects to be able to answer exam questions. How this will impact on different qualifications will vary depending on how the assessments are structured. But for all subjects it remains important for students to cover all the content for them to be fully prepared.

How will advance information work in practice?

Advance information will help focus student revision for the summer 2022 exams. It will not provide the questions themselves, but will give the general areas students need to cover. The advance information is only available from our website and you can find it using our advance information finder. Every relevant qualification page also includes a direct link to it.

There are many ways you could use it in the classroom, from discussion, to checklists and targeted teaching and revision activities focussing on the content of the document. We’d love to hear of your experiences with it – so please do get in contact with us to share your views.

What does high and low tariff mean?

While this will vary between different specifications and assessments, ‘tariff’ is the number of marks allocated to a given question.

As an example, the following was a question on our GCSE Citizenship specimen material:

‘First-past-the-post’ is the election system used in the UK for general elections. State one other example of an election system used in the UK’

It is worth a single mark and so is a low tariff question.

On the other hand, the following question carries 12 marks so would be a high tariff question

‘Use your knowledge and understanding from across the whole Citizenship course to evaluate the following viewpoint: Nobody does more to protect people’s rights in the UK than those who own and work for media organisations’

Will targeting higher tariff questions disadvantage any students?

You might have seen some recent articles about advance information, specifically discussing the impact of only providing information for high tariff (or mark) questions. As mentioned previously, not every subject’s advance information will focus solely on high tariff aspects of the assessment, so this might not be applicable to you. If in doubt please do check the summary document or contact us.

The FAQ published by the JCQ makes this point:

Advance information is being provided to support revision, but the information provided still needs to avoid predictability or the possibility of being able to identify questions in advance. By focusing on higher tariff questions, the advance information does not risk undermining the qualification, but does help students and teachers focus revision on the areas worth most marks.

There are a couple of things worth highlighting here. High tariff questions are not necessarily the hardest questions on a paper. Often the longer essay style questions are the ones designed to test all ability ranges, to enable every student to get some marks based on their relative ability. It is entirely possible that some of the smallest mark questions on the paper are designed to be some of the hardest. This won’t be the case on every paper and in every specification, but it is worth highlighting.

Having advance information on high tariff questions could make a significant difference to many students. With these longer mark questions, it’s not necessarily the complexity of the question – a lot of essays are quite simple in what they want you to do. The trick is knowing what information is needed to answer them.

During my teaching days, I found some students couldn’t always engage with those questions – usually because they didn’t know what content was needed for them. Having advance information on what could be covered in the high tariff elements of the assessment should help focus the revision and provide them with the knowledge they need to better respond to those questions that are worth the most marks.

Can you just tell us which questions are covered?

We do appreciate that this is something you would like to know, but unfortunately, it’s not something we are able to provide. It may be the case that some questions that are considered ‘low’ tariff are covered by advance information provided for ‘high’ tariff questions. To say, for example, that all 3-mark and below questions are not included could be unintentionally misleading.

On the other side of the coin, to simply list which questions are included could lead to predictability of questions and undermine the qualification. It could also be unhelpful to both students and teachers, for example by listing topics that could lead to excessive teaching or revision on areas that are worth few marks. By giving all the low tariff information as well, it could also be the case that the whole specification is then listed, which would be less help!