COMS10014

Mathematics A

Assessment

This unit is worth 20 credit points, which is 1/6 of your first year. Your first year does not count towards your degree classification, but you do need to pass it to progress to 2nd year.

You get awarded credit for this unit, which you need to progress to 2nd year, if you get a mark of at least 40% on the exam.

Exam Week

This unit will be assessed by a single 2 hour exam held in an exam hall in the December 2026 exam week. The prior week will not have any new content, and is set aside for revision.

You must be in Bristol for entirety of the exam week, and your exact exam date and time will be published in your exam timetable closer to the date.

Exam Format

The exam consists of a series of multiple choice questions. This format differs from the questions laid out in the problem sheets, and may be unfamiliar, but if you feel comfortable with the problem sheets, then you are definitely ready for the exam.

Do not be fooled into thinking that a multiple choice exam is easier, the exam will still test your ability to work with the skills you have developed throughout the unit, it won’t be sufficient to memorise key terms!

Grade Boundaries

As with all undergraduate university courses, 40/100 is the required mark for passing (3rd), 50/100 gets you a 2:2 (lower 2nd), 60/100 gets you an 2:1 (upper 2nd), and 70/100 gets you a 1st. Whilst you might be used to receive marks in the 80s/90s, these marks are quite uncommon at university. That means that it is normal to find there are questions that you don’t know how to tackle or that you don’t feel confident on.

Exam Materials

Calculators are not allowed on this exam. The exam questions will be written with this in mind. You will not be expected to calculate the cosine of the square root of 5 in your head, or anything like that; for most questions relating to logic, sets, and functions a calculator would not be much use in the first place. For the combinatorics and probability part, you will be expected to be able to do simple arithmetic either in your head or longhand on paper, e.g. expressing 3/7 to three decimal places.