STEP 2017: Grade Boundaries and Practice

In 2017 STEP was still run as three parallel papers: STEP 1 (paper code 9465), STEP 2 (9470) and STEP 3 (9475). Under the format in force at the time, each paper carried 13 questions (8 Pure Mathematics, 3 Mechanics and 2 Probability and Statistics), lasted 3 hours, counted only a candidate's best 6 answers towards the total, and came with a formula booklet in the exam room. Nothing about the format changed that year; the reform to the question count and specification only arrived in 2019.

The official grade boundaries below are taken from that year's Explanation of Results, with each paper marked out of 120:

STEP results are reported as S (Outstanding), 1 (Very Good), 2 (Good), 3 (Satisfactory) or U (Unclassified). The marking rules are simple: every question is worth 20 marks, a correct answer earns full marks whatever method is used, each paper is marked out of 120, and only the best 6 answers count towards the total. The numbers in the table above are the minimum totals needed for each grade that year.

Setting 2017 against 2016 makes the picture clearer. On STEP 1, the grade 1 boundary went from 75 in 2016 to 72 in 2017, and the S boundary from 102 to 99, so the bar sat slightly lower than the year before. On STEP 2, the grade 1 boundary went from 74 to 80 and the S boundary from 95 to 101; on STEP 3, the grade 1 boundary went from 64 to 69 and the S boundary from 88 to 95, so both of those papers set a higher bar than the year before.

Boundaries move every year: they reflect how hard the questions turned out to be and how the cohort performed, and there has never been a fixed pass mark. Cambridge offer conditions vary by college and by year, so always read the exact wording of the offer itself rather than treating any single year's boundaries as an admissions promise.

The statistics below describe the STEP 2017 questions held in the FrontierVue database; they are a platform-level view, not an official analysis of the papers. Each of the three papers is held in full with 13 questions, matching the official structure of the year: 8 Pure Mathematics, 3 Mechanics and 2 Probability and Statistics per paper.

On difficulty labels, STEP 1 and STEP 2 each carry 12 questions tagged Hard and 1 tagged Medium, while STEP 3 carries 9 tagged Hard and 4 tagged Medium. On the platform's reckoning, all three papers lean hard that year, with STEP 3 holding a somewhat larger share of medium-difficulty questions.

By topic tag, the year's questions cluster around Pure Mathematics (24 questions), STEP Mechanics (9), Integration Techniques (7), Coordinate Geometry (7) and STEP Probability (6), followed by Induction & Recursion (5) and Inequalities (4). Anyone training against this year's emphasis will keep running into integration technique, coordinate geometry and induction, so those are the blocks to sharpen first.

FrontierVue holds 111 sets of past STEP papers (1987 to 2025), 1,532 questions in total, every one with a fully worked solution. Open /papers/step and pick 2017 to sit STEP 1, STEP 2 and STEP 3 in a timed interface, with question-by-question analysis after submission. The two most recent past papers in each subject are free to try, so you can test the interface at no cost before working back to the 2017 papers.

The guides are worth reading alongside the papers: /exams/step/guides/step-2 and /exams/step/guides/step-3 map out preparation for the two papers still running today; /exams/step/guides/choosing-questions covers how to pick questions once the paper is open, which is itself a scoring strategy when only your best 6 answers count; /exams/step/guides/writing-solutions covers turning a question you can do into a full 20-mark write-up; and /exams/step/guides/grades explains how the grades are used in applications. The resource library also holds the official OCR specification and STEP Support Programme materials.