STEP 2023: Grade Boundaries, Topic Trends and Practice

Only two papers ran in 2023: STEP 2 (paper code 9470) and STEP 3 (paper code 9475). STEP 1 had been discontinued from 2021, so candidates in 2023 sat whichever of the two remaining papers their offer conditions required. The year also marked an administrative milestone: 2023 was the final sitting delivered by Cambridge Assessment Admissions Testing (CAAT), with delivery passing to OCR, part of the same Cambridge family, from 2024.

The official grade boundaries, published in the Explanation of Results for STEP 2023, are below. Each paper is marked out of 120.

Each paper is a 3-hour written exam containing 12 questions (8 pure mathematics, 2 mechanics, 2 probability and statistics). Candidates choose which questions to attempt, and only their best 6 answers count towards the total.

STEP results are reported on five grades: S (Outstanding), 1 (Very Good), 2 (Good), 3 (Satisfactory) and U (Unclassified). Every question is marked out of 20, each paper is out of 120, and only your best 6 questions count towards the total. A correct answer earns full marks whatever method you use. A boundary simply means: reach that total and you receive that grade.

The previous year gives useful context. The official 2022 boundaries were S 81, grade 1 at 62, grade 2 at 52 and grade 3 at 30 on STEP 2, and S 82, grade 1 at 63, grade 2 at 51 and grade 3 at 29 on STEP 3. In 2023 the movements went in more than one direction on the same paper: on STEP 2 the S boundary rose from 81 to 90 and grade 1 from 62 to 65, while grade 2 eased from 52 to 50 and grade 3 from 30 to 28; on STEP 3, S rose from 82 to 85, grade 1 held at 63, grade 2 rose from 51 to 54 and grade 3 from 29 to 32.

Boundaries move every year. They reflect how the paper played out for that cohort, a combination of question difficulty and candidate performance, and the exam board does not publish a cause-by-cause breakdown, so single-year movements should not be over-read. There is also no official 'safe score': Cambridge offer conditions vary by college and by year, so always go by the exact wording of your own offer.

The statistics below come from FrontierVUE's own tagging of the STEP 2023 questions in its database. They are a platform-side view, not an official analysis of the papers.

On difficulty, 2023 reads as an unforgiving year: of the 12 STEP 2 questions in the database, 10 are tagged HARD and 2 MEDIUM, and all 12 STEP 3 questions are tagged HARD. Read alongside the official boundary movements (upper grades on STEP 2 rising while lower grades eased), it is best treated as a strongly differentiating year: the top grades demanded visibly higher-quality complete solutions.

On topics, counting both papers together, Pure Mathematics leads with 17 tags, followed by STEP Mechanics and STEP Probability on 4 each; Integration Techniques, Induction & Recursion, Coordinate Geometry and Differential Equations each appear 3 times, Complex Numbers and Curve Sketching twice each, and Inequalities once. That sits naturally with the structure of the papers (8 pure mathematics questions, 2 mechanics and 2 probability and statistics per paper): pure technique dominates, and integration, induction, coordinate geometry and differential equations were the recurring handles of the year, which makes them sensible priorities when preparing with these papers.

Open /papers/step and find the 2023 STEP 2 and STEP 3 papers by year. The timed exam interface reproduces the 3-hour format, and after submission you get a question-by-question breakdown showing exactly where marks were lost. FrontierVUE hosts 111 STEP past papers (1987 to 2025) with 1,532 questions in total, each with a full worked solution, and the latest two papers in each subject are free to try. The resource library also carries the official OCR specification and STEP Support Programme materials.

The guides are worth pairing with the papers: /exams/step/guides/step-2 and /exams/step/guides/step-3 cover preparation for each paper; /exams/step/guides/choosing-questions is about question selection, which is a core skill in an exam where only your best 6 answers count; /exams/step/guides/writing-solutions covers how to write solutions that score; and /exams/step/guides/grades walks through the grading system, a natural companion to the 2023 numbers on this page.