Last May exam

Students seem generally upbeat about the last set of May examinations for the 'legacy' Subject Guide.

A glance at Paper 1 suggests that all is in order, apart from some questions that could have been worded better. The inclusion of a Higher Level question about the 'ripple' potential difference of a diode-capacitor circuit feels a bit like a 'last hurrah'. Perhaps it was a little unkind to include a permittivity question at Standard Level. I won't be sad to say farewell to polarisation! With calculators coming aboard next year, I wonder if we can expect a higher proportion of questions in which calculators are of no use (e.g. dimensional analysis).

Students tackling Paper 2 would do well to have practised different command terms, for example when 'stating' the area under a curve. We have a notionally 'linked' question of the kind we expect more of next year with current electricity moving to charges in a magnetic field; perhaps there is something that November 2023 schools can learn from this. When the sum of the currents entering a junction equals the sum of currents leaving the junction, will students know whether the fundamental law of Physics is "conservation of charge" or "Kirchhoff's first law"? My Standard Level students will be happy that the lambda baryon's quark content was spelled out.

It's nice to see the now-familiar check of whether students understand proportionality in Paper 3. The obsession with linearisation remains; will this change in future years now that virtually all students use software for graphing that is capable of testing other relationships? It's interesting to see so many (short) Astrophysics questions. Papers like this one might prove useful as inspiration for IAs and EEs in the future, even if their questions fall out of use.