Frequency and Boundaries

#WBS11 — SIGNAL: Frequency & Grade-Boundary Reference (Unit 1: Marketing and People)

Provenance (2026-09-28). Built from research/veridian/WBS11-verified-facts.md (all 13 sections, read in full for this pass) and, for the two most recent series it doesn't yet cover, the independent primary-source check already recorded in content/veridian/technique-hub/wbs11/forge-exam-technique-guide.md (January 2025, October 2024 — marked † below and clearly separated from the facts bank's own denominator, since those two series were checked only for the specific topics FORGE names, not re-audited sub-point by sub-point). Cross-referenced against codex-definitions-and-application-bank.md (same paper) so nothing here repeats their content, and against content/veridian/question-bank/wbs11.ts, which already holds three of the real anchors indexed below as full worked mark schemes. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Pearson Edexcel. This is deliberately the narrowest of this paper's three technique-hub documents — see "How to use this," below, for why.

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#1. Topic frequency — verified sightings, not predicted probability

What this table counts: real exam questions independently found, quoted and cited in the facts bank (or, where marked †, in the FORGE guide's own fresh primary-source check) for each spec sub-section. What it does not mean: a percentage chance a topic appears on any future paper. Pearson does not publish a topic-rotation schedule, and this archive is a bounded sample — different sub-points were checked against different numbers of series (footnoted below), so a "0" means zero sightings in the series actually checked, not zero sightings ever. Read every row as "seen in N of M series checked," never as "N/M likely."

Archive-size footnotes: ⁶ = the 6-series core pass (Jun 2019, Jun 2022, Jan 2023, Jun 2023, Jan 2024, Jun 2024). ⁷ = core 6 plus Oct 2021, for spec points that got a dedicated follow-up fetch. ¹⁹ = the full 19-series local archive (Jan 2019–2025, Jun 2019/2021–2025, Oct 2019–2022/2024/2025), spot-checked only for the specific sub-points named in the facts bank's 2026-09-25 pass. † = a sighting found independently in Jan 2025 or Oct 2024 by the FORGE guide, not yet folded into the facts bank's own denominator.

Highest-confidence pattern across the whole table: 1.3.2 (demand/supply/PED/YED) is the only spec point that appeared in literally every series checked — every other sub-section has at least one gap year in the archive reviewed. The mirror pattern: several named-by-spec items (sampling methods; staff as asset/cost; centralised/decentralised structure; Mayo and Herzberg by name; paternalistic and laissez-faire leadership; distribution channel stages) have zero confirmed sightings across everything checked here, some across as many as 19 series — genuinely untested in this archive, not merely under-counted.

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#2. Grade boundaries

Not available in the sources checked. WBS11-verified-facts.md §0 documents exactly what was gathered for this paper — question papers, mark schemes and examiners' reports, fetched from qualifications.pearson.com or the local archive — and at no point does its provenance log, or either technique-hub document built from it, reference a grade-boundaries document for WBS11. A targeted check of the local archive (~/Downloads/PAPERI/IAL_Unit1_Complete_2024_2025/ and ~/Documents/SOL/Old/REVI/BEESWAX/) for this pass turned up no file matching "grade boundary," "boundaries," or similar naming, for this paper or any series of it.

This is a real, distinct gap from the "level boundaries" language that does appear in the facts bank (e.g. §0's note on Level 1–4 mark bands for individual questions) — those are per-question mark-scheme level descriptors, not the whole-paper raw-mark-to-grade thresholds a grade-boundaries document would carry. The two are easy to conflate and are not the same thing.

Pearson does publish grade boundaries for each IAL series, separately from the question paper/mark scheme/examiner-report triplet this course's research draws on, on qualifications.pearson.com. No boundary figures are stated here because none were found in any source reviewed for this document — a student wanting them should check Pearson's own results information directly rather than trust a number invented to fill this gap.

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#3. How to use this document

The counts above measure archive coverage, not the exam board's future behaviour. A "0" is a real, disclosed gap in past papers — it is not permission to skip that sub-point, and this paper's own cross-cutting pattern (§4 of the facts bank) is that a spec point's first real appearance is disproportionately badly answered, precisely because it arrives with no exam history to prepare against. A thin row above is, if anything, a reason for more preparation on that sub-point, not less — the spec still requires it regardless of what's shown up in the papers actually reviewed.

This document does not reproduce the real past questions themselves — that is deliberate. The real, worked past questions with full mark schemes, examiner-report commentary and graded level-exemplars live in content/veridian/question-bank/wbs11.ts, which already carries three of the exact anchors indexed above (Skechers PLC, the electric-scooter B2B/B2C question, and Lehman's) as complete, student-facing worked answers. Use that file for the real question-bank function; use this table only to see, at a glance, which parts of the specification the reviewed archive has and hasn't confirmed being examined, and at what tariff.