Frequency and Boundaries

Provenance: compiled 2026-09-28. Source is research/veridian/WMA11-verified-facts.md §2, §4, §6 and §7 only — no new primary-source extraction was done for this document; every count below is a direct tally of the facts bank's own named, quoted findings, not a fresh read of any paper. That facts bank touched nine series (Jan 2019, Oct 2020, Oct 2021, Oct 2022, Jan 2023, Jan 2024, Jan 2025, June 2022, June 2023) but at very uneven depth: five have a fully-read examiner report (Jan 2019, Oct 2020, Oct 2021, Jan 2023, Jan 2025) — a full paper's worth of question-by-question commentary each; two are confirmed-genuine mark schemes that were never mined question-by-question (Oct 2022, Jan 2024); two more were read for one targeted question each, not the full paper (June 2022 Q5 only; June 2023 Q1–Q2 only). Every frequency count below uses the five fully-read series as its denominator, because those are the only ones where "not mentioned" is informative rather than just "not yet read." Not affiliated with or endorsed by Pearson Edexcel.

#WMA11 — Frequency & Boundaries Quick-Reference

#Pearson Edexcel IAL Mathematics, Unit 1: Pure Mathematics P1 — the SIGNAL-equivalent layer

#0. What this is

Two tables and an honest answer about grade boundaries. Everything else about this paper — timing, mark-coding, formulae, worked methods, traps — is already covered by forge-exam-technique-guide.md and codex-formula-and-method-bank.md in this same folder; this document does not repeat any of it. It exists only to answer two questions a student asks before revising: what's actually likely to come up, and what mark did a C/B/A used to need — using only what the research pass actually verified, with the gaps stated rather than papered over.

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#1. Topic frequency, by spec strand

Denominator: 5 (Jan 2019, Oct 2020, Oct 2021, Jan 2023, Jan 2025 — the five series with a fully-read examiner report). "Seen in N of 5" means a confirmed, quoted finding for that strand exists in that series' report; a strand not listed for a series was not flagged there, which more often means "no notable trap was reported," not "the topic didn't appear" — spec strands 1–5 are all compulsory content, so some quieter appearances are certainly missing from this count.

Strand 1 is confirmed in every series checked because it is by far the widest strand in the spec (12 numbered sub-points vs. 2–3 for the others) and routinely supplies two or three separate questions on one paper, not one. Strand 2 (equation of a line; parallel/perpendicular conditions) has only 2 sub-points and is typically a single, smaller question — 2 of 5 confirmed sightings is consistent with a thinner strand, not evidence it's skippable.

Strand 1 broken out by recurring question type (within-strand; a single series can hit several):

The last row is the one genuine surprise: a full line-meets-curve simultaneous-equations question was confirmed in only one of the five fully-read series (and it paired the line with a reciprocal curve, not a quadratic — the facts bank explicitly searched four series for a line-meets-quadratic pairing and found none). Two more sightings exist outside the 5-series base — June 2023 Q2 (a word-problem variant, perimeter/area of a rectangle) and June 2022 Q5(a) (reconstructing a quadratic from its turning point) — but both come from single targeted-question reads of series otherwise unmined, so they're reported here as corroboration, not folded into the N/5 counts above.

Mark-weight reconstruction — Jan 2023 only. This is the one series where the facts bank's citations cover enough of the paper to attribute marks to a strand with confidence; Jan 2024's question-by-question marks are known (see the FORGE guide §1) but its topics were never mined, so no weight breakdown exists for it. Q8 (8 marks) has no confirmed topic anywhere in the research pass and is left unclassified rather than guessed.

Treat this as one data point, not a pattern — it is a single series, and the spec's own AO/mark-allocation rules don't fix a strand's mark share paper to paper (question count itself varies 10–11). It's included because it's real and checkable, not because one series proves a trend.

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#2. Grade boundaries

No verified grade-boundary data exists in the sources for this document. The underlying facts bank flags exactly one figure — an October 2022 boundary set (A* 51, A 43, B 35, C 27, D 20, E —, raw marks out of 75) — surfaced incidentally by a web search, and marks it explicitly UNVERIFIED: it was never checked against Pearson's own primary grade-boundaries document. Per this task's hard rule against fabricating or repeating unverified boundaries, that figure is not reproduced here, consistent with the FORGE and CODEX documents in this folder, which made the same call.

If you need real grade boundaries, get them from Pearson directly: the official document is titled "Grade boundaries — International Advanced Level" for the relevant series, published on qualifications.pearson.com. Until someone in this course fetches and pdftotext-verifies that PDF the way every other claim in this technique hub was verified, no boundary figure for WMA11 should be stated as fact anywhere in this course's materials.

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#3. How to use this

• The strand table tells you where the marks cluster across real papers: algebra and functions is the single largest, most reliably-tested strand, so it earns the most revision time by volume alone — not because it's "more likely," but because it's worth more of the paper more often.
• The sub-topic table is a checklist, not a prediction. "Seen in 1 of 5" (simultaneous equations by substitution) does not mean it's unlikely to appear this series — spec 1.6 is compulsory content — it means this research pass only has one clean worked instance of it, so lean on codex-formula-and-method-bank.md §2.1.4 for the method rather than expecting more past-paper pattern-matching here.
• Don't read the Jan 2023 mark-weight table as "this is what a WMA11 paper looks like." It's what one paper looked like. Use it to sanity-check a study plan, not to build one.
• No grade-boundary number appears in this course's WMA11 materials anywhere, for the reason given in §2. Don't let a study plan depend on one until that changes.