Just seen that 110 was the cutoff this year. It seems a bit of a jump from 107 last year.

Reading the raw score thread - I can’t work out if that means it was a harder year, easier year, more people passing etc.

My eldest passed last year (all over 110 - one just!) but wondering what it means for my youngest next year. Is it still roughly 50% for a pass? Any idea why it has jumped up so much?

It's an interesting question and I've been pondering the whys too.

Ultimately they have an approx set number of people they can pass (allowing room for head teacher appeals) and the rest have to fail. The scores have to reflect the "right" number of people passing. Possibly this year more people actually did a little better, or more likely that the papers were generally a little easier and as a result they had to make the pass mark a little higher to make sure the "right" number of people passed. As scores are standardised I'm unclear as to why it was necessary to make the pass mark higher though, but I'm no expert in the process what so ever!

I think the big question will be what effect the higher pass mark has on cut off scores.

As the pass mark went up 9 points (is that right?) then will the cut off go up by about the same number of points for schools such as Judd and TGS? And will a school like Skinners' who has a published cut off for 2020 of 360 end up with a smaller catchment area because more boys will have got 360+ than last year? If so Skinners' will likely raise the 360 threshold for 2021 entry.

Always there are unknowns and uncertainties unfortunately as benchmarks seem to change every year. I'm very interested to hear what people think about what the higher pass rate will mean this year.

The cut off is worked out from this years’s cohort.
You cannot compare one year with another.

Yo-yo - I’m convinced I knew it was 107 before the results last year. But maybe I’ve misremembered. Does it change each year? I thought it was 106 for a while before it changed last year. So wasn’t expecting it to change this year (and by 3 for each subject).

Each year's cohort varies, as does the test.