Advanced Higher Statistics grade boundaries 2025, out of 120

Advanced Higher Statistics grade boundaries 2025

The table below is taken from SQA's 2025 grade boundaries workbook, released on 5 August 2025, and agrees with the minimum marks in the 2025 course report.

The 120 marks come from two question papers, according to the specification: Paper 1 is worth 30 marks and lasts 1 hour, and Paper 2 is worth 90 marks and lasts 2 hours 45 minutes. Paper 2 therefore carries three quarters of the grade. There is no project. Topics and the data you can use are in our Advanced Higher Statistics guide and formula sheet guide.

Worked example: 72 out of 120

A candidate scores 18 out of 30 on Paper 1 and 54 out of 90 on Paper 2. Both are 60%, and the total is 72. Look down the table: 72 is above the B boundary of 69 and below the A boundary of 82. The grade is a B, 3 marks above the B line and 10 short of an A.

Because Paper 2 is three times as large as Paper 1, the extra 10 marks needed for an A are likelier to come from Paper 2 than from the shorter paper.

How 2025 compares with 2024

Every boundary dropped, and the gap widens as you go down, from 2 marks at A to 5 marks at D. The course report explains that Paper 1 proved more demanding than expected, the demand in questions 1(a), 1(d), 1(f)(iii), 2(c) and 2(e) being higher than intended, and that Paper 2 performed as expected. The boundaries were set with that in mind.

Advanced Higher Statistics boundaries since 2019

The maximum was 100 in 2019, 110 in 2022 and 2023, then 120. Convert to shares to compare: the 2025 A boundary is 68% of the total, against 70% in 2024.

Who sat it and how they did

The course report records 176 resulted entries, up from 150 in 2024, before the appeals process was complete. A small entry means a few candidates can move the percentages.

Nearly half of the entry got an A, and 15.3% got No Award.

Mistakes from the 2025 Paper 1 report

• Describe the random variable in context. In 1(a) some candidates referred to the filler sounds themselves, not to the occurrence of filler sounds.
• Read the table properly. In 1(c) many candidates did not use the first two columns of Table 1, the values and their frequencies, correctly when finding the mean rate.
• Mind the inequality. In 1(d) many used a single-value probability, P(X = 5), where the question needed a cumulative one.
• Count constraints. In 1(e) many did not count the estimated parameter as an extra constraint when giving degrees of freedom.
• State full hypotheses. In 1(f)(iii) some candidates lost marks for incomplete hypotheses.

Use a daily paper as a rough guide

There is no daily paper for Advanced Higher Statistics itself, so the closest practice is the Higher Applications of Maths paper, a short timed paper of 8 questions and 25 to 35 marks. Mark it, convert to a percentage and compare it with 68% (the A line) and 47% (the C line). It tests statistics at a lower level, so treat a good score as encouragement and not as a prediction. Answers and the mark scheme arrive once the paper is marked.

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