Frequency and Boundaries

Provenance: written 2026-09-28, grounded in research/veridian/WMA14-verified-facts.md and cross-referenced against this pair's own already-verified figures in content/veridian/technique-hub/wma14/forge-exam-technique-guide.md (§1's real per-question mark tariffs) and codex-formula-and-method-bank.md (the spec-point/lesson-file grouping). No new primary document was fetched for this file — it re-analyses the facts bank's existing §5 citations by series, and does not extend the evidence base beyond what those two documents already established. Every mark-weight figure below is a single real confirmed question, cited as such, not an average or a paper-wide weighting — this spec does not publish one (see §1 below).

#WMA14 · SIGNAL — Topic Frequency & Grade Boundaries

This is deliberately the narrowest of the three WMA14 reference documents. It answers two questions only: how often has each spec topic actually shown up in the series this course has verified primary documents for, and what do real grade boundaries say. It does not re-teach technique (the 12 curriculum lessons do that) and does not repeat FORGE's exam-craft layer or CODEX's formula masterlist — both are cited, not duplicated.

#How to use this document

The frequency table is evidence of past coverage across a small, specific set of series — not a prediction of what will appear on any future paper, and not a substitute for knowing every spec point cold (spec 1.3 and Pearson's own guidance both note IAL papers can, and do, test any listed content in any series). Read "seen in N of M series checked" as exactly that: a count grounded in real citations, against a small, stated denominator — never as a probability, and never rounded into a percentage. Combine this with FORGE (how to play the marking system) and CODEX (the formulae and method skeletons) rather than in place of either.

#1. Topic frequency, by spec point

Denominator and what it means. The facts bank has at least one primary document for 11 series, but only 7 of those received real, question-by-question mining — the other five (June 2021 provisional, January 2023, June 2023, October 2023, June 2024) had their mark schemes checked only for the shared general-marking-guidance boilerplate (M/A/B definitions, abbreviations), not analysed question by question, so they contribute no topic-specific citations either way. The honest denominator for a topic frequency claim is therefore the 7 series with question-level findings: January 2021, October 2021, June 2022, October 2022, January 2024, October 2024, January 2026. A topic absent from a series' row below means no citation for it was captured in this course's review of that series — not that the topic was confirmed absent from that paper.

No official per-topic mark weighting exists to check this against. The spec (p.69) publishes only an assessment-objective mark range for P4 out of 75 — AO1 25–30, AO2 25–30, AO3 5–10, AO4 5–10, AO5 5–10 — nothing per spec point. The "marks" column below is therefore a single real confirmed question's size, not a weighting; it is sourced from FORGE §1 rather than re-derived here, and marked "—" where neither source document captured one.

Two things worth reading correctly rather than over-reading:

• Proof by contradiction's 6-of-7 is a genuine, robust finding — it is also the topic the examiner reports most consistently flag as weakly answered (facts bank §5.1), so high frequency and low average performance co-occur here, not high frequency and confidence.
• The bottom two rows (1 of 7 each) are a sourcing artefact, not evidence of rarity. Area under a parametric curve (6.5) is a compulsory, explicitly spec-listed skill (§1 above) that had zero citations anywhere in this facts bank until the January 2026 series was reviewed — it is the thinnest-evidenced spec point in the whole document, not a topic Pearson rarely tests. The same caution applies to position vectors/foot-of-perpendicular, evidenced by exactly one series. Do not read either row as "safe to deprioritise."

#2. Grade boundaries

No real grade-boundary data exists in this course's WMA14 source review. WMA14-verified-facts.md contains no grade-boundary figures anywhere — it was built from the specification, the formula booklet, mark schemes and examiner's reports, none of which publish grade boundaries (those are released separately, per series, on Pearson's results-day boundary documents). A direct search of the facts bank for boundary-related content this session found only mathematical domain/range boundaries inside worked questions (e.g. an interval endpoint in a parametric domain), not grade-boundary marks — confirming the gap is real, not an oversight in searching.

This document does not estimate, interpolate or otherwise invent a boundary figure. Stating a number here without a primary Pearson grade-boundaries document behind it would violate this course's own no-fabrication discipline, the same standard the facts bank, FORGE and CODEX all hold to elsewhere. Real WMA14/P4 grade boundaries, where published, live on Pearson's own results-day documents (searchable via qualifications.pearson.com's grade boundaries archive, by series and paper code WMA14/01); fetching and verifying those — the same primary-source discipline used for every other claim in this facts bank — is future work, not something this pass had in scope or could responsibly shortcut.

#3. Flagged gaps

• The 7-series denominator is this document's own recount, not a figure copied from facts-bank §6 verbatim — §6 states "11 series with at least one document," but only 7 of those yielded real, question-level citations when §5 is read topic by topic (the October 2024 series in particular is cited extensively in §5 but is not named in §6's own 11-series list, an inconsistency in the source document worth flagging rather than silently resolving either way).
• A topic's absence from a series' citation list is not evidence that series omitted it. Restated from §1: five reviewed series contributed no question-level citations for any topic, because their mark schemes were checked only for shared boilerplate.
• No grade-boundary primary source was reviewed this session — see §2. This is a genuine, open gap, not a "checked and found nothing published" result.

#Sources used

research/veridian/WMA14-verified-facts.md §5 (per-topic citations, re-tallied by series for this document), §6 (series/document-count, cross-checked and found incomplete against §5 — see §3 above), §2 (AO mark-range table, spec p.69). Real mark-weight figures are reused, not re-derived, from forge-exam-technique-guide.md §1. Spec-point/lesson-file groupings are reused from codex-formula-and-method-bank.md Part 2. No new primary Pearson document was fetched for this file.

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