STEP preparation guide

STEP question selection: finding your best six out of twelve

Q: Do you only answer six questions in STEP, or are all attempts counted?

It is not a choose-six system. Every question you attempt is marked, and your total is the sum of your six best-scoring answers (each out of 20, maximum 120). Extra attempts are not void; they simply do not count beyond your best six.

Q: Is there a penalty for attempting more than six STEP questions?

There is no mark penalty and everything is marked. But OCR explicitly advises against attempting more than six, noting that candidates who do so rarely score as well as those who concentrate on six: with time spread thin, every attempt stalls in its early parts and the best-six total ends up lower.

Q: How long should I spend on each STEP question?

Think in units of roughly 30 minutes per question: spend 10 to 15 of the 180 minutes reading and ranking all twelve, leaving about 160 minutes for six questions at 26 to 30 minutes each, with 10 minutes reserved for final checks. That is an average, not a ration; 18 minutes on one question and 40 on another is normal.

Q: What should I do if a STEP question stalls halfway, and should I cross it out?

Switch to another question and do not cross out your working. Marking rewards progress towards a solution, so the lines you have written keep their marks and stay in the best-six pool automatically. Crossed-out work is not marked unless you clearly indicate otherwise, so crossing out throws away marks you may already have earned.

Q: How many questions do I need to solve for a grade 1 in STEP?

Using the published 2026 boundaries as a scale: grade 1 on STEP 2 was 62 out of 120, about three complete questions (60 marks) plus change, while grade 1 on STEP 3 was 56, below the value of three full questions. S is far more demanding: 84 on STEP 2 means averaging 14 out of 20 across six answers. Boundaries move each year with the cohort, so treat these as reference points, not fixed thresholds.

Q: Can I answer only pure questions in STEP and skip mechanics and statistics?

The rules allow it: there is no restriction on how many questions you attempt from any section, and Section A offers eight pure questions, enough for six with two spare. But that margin is thin, and in a year where the pure section runs hard you have no fallback. The safer configuration is pure as your main engine with at least one of mechanics or statistics trained to exam standard.

The most expensive decisions in a STEP exam are not algebraic; they are the moments you decide which question to work on next. With 12 questions on each paper and only your best six answers counting, selection is a second discipline running alongside the mathematics itself, and at the same level of ability it can be worth a full grade. This guide takes the rule apart properly, then builds a decision routine you can carry into the exam room: how to run the opening read-through, how to rank the questions, when to switch, how to cut up three hours, and what the published 2026 boundaries say about how strong your six answers need to be for a grade 1 or an S.

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STEP Selection Rules at a Glance

Scoring: 12 questions per paper, each out of 20; only your best six count, for a maximum of 120, in a three-hour paper
Sections: Section A eight pure, Section B two mechanics, Section C two probability and statistics; no restriction on how many you attempt from any section
OCR's advice: Every attempt is marked and extra attempts carry no penalty, but OCR advises against attempting more than six
2026 boundaries: STEP 2: S 84, grade 1 62, grade 2 52. STEP 3: S 80, grade 1 56, grade 2 48
Booklet and exam room: No rough paper, no calculators and no formulae booklet; crossed-out work is not marked unless you clearly indicate that it should be

Structure, scoring and the advice against attempting more than six come from the OCR STEP specification, the official FAQs and OCR's scoring pages; the boundaries from OCR's Explanation of Results for STEP 2026; the booklet and exam-room rules from OCR's STEP Test Specific Instructions and the specification.

In short

Every attempt is marked and only your best six count; it is not a choose-six-first system. OCR advises against attempting more than six, and six questions done properly is the winning shape.
Spend the first 10 to 15 minutes reading all twelve questions and ranking them by confidence, then think in roughly 30-minute units per question.
Marking rewards progress towards a solution, so switching away from a stalled question is cheap; an abandoned attempt still competes for your best six as long as you do not cross it out.
On the 2026 boundaries, grade 1 on STEP 2 (62/120) is about three complete questions plus change, and S (84/120) is about four near-perfect answers plus two solid halves; your target grade sets how many near-20 answers you need.
The 30-second triage instinct is built only through timed full papers; the free STEP Support Programme and the official worked solutions for papers from 2019 onwards are ready-made training material.

Part 1 of 3

Sections 01 to 03

Get the rule right: everything is marked, your best six count

STEP 2 and STEP 3 each contain 12 questions, each marked out of 20, in a three-hour paper. The scoring rule fits in one sentence, and almost everyone misreads it at first: every question you attempt is marked, and your final score is the sum of your six best-scoring answers, out of a maximum of 120.

Questions per paper

Twelve

The same on both STEP 2 and STEP 3

Marks per question

There is no completion bonus of any kind

What counts

Your six best-scoring answers

Other attempts are still marked; they just do not add to the total

Maximum and duration

120 marks, three hours

Six answers at 20 marks each

Misreading 1: you nominate six questions and forfeit the rest

It is not a choose-six system. The OCR FAQ is explicit that you may answer as many questions as you wish and that all of your answers will be marked, with only the best six counting towards your total.

Misreading 2: extra attempts are free insurance

There is no mark penalty, but the same FAQ adds something just as important: attempting more than six is not advisable, and candidates who spread themselves across more questions rarely score as well as those who concentrate on six.

Misreading 3: finishing a question earns something extra

There is no completion bonus. Each question is marked strictly out of 20 against the mark scheme, so a finished question earns exactly what the mark scheme awards and nothing extra.

Put those three facts together and the shape of the exam becomes clear. STEP hands you a menu of twelve and pays you for your best six choices. Ordering more dishes does not add marks; it only dilutes the time you can spend on each. Question selection is therefore not a minor piece of exam technique. It sits alongside mathematical ability as a core skill that the paper is quietly testing.

The map of the paper: Sections A, B and C, with no quotas

Each paper splits its twelve questions across three sections, and the specification adds a line that matters more than it looks: no restriction is placed on the number of questions you may attempt from any section. That freedom deserves its own paragraph, because it should shape your preparation.

	Section A	Section B	Section C
Number of questions	Eight	Two	Two
Content	Pure	Mechanics	Probability and statistics
Quota on attempts	None	None	None

The six that count can come from any combination of sections: Section A alone can supply a full set, and all four questions in Sections B and C are equally available to you.

Pure alone offers eight questions and you only need six to count, so a candidate who never touches mechanics or statistics can, in principle, assemble a full set from Section A with two questions to spare. The practical conclusion is to stop preparing for coverage and start preparing for your intended portfolio: train hardest on the question types you actually plan to rely on in the exam room, and choose on the day by the same logic.

One caution: a pure-only strategy means finding six workable questions out of eight, a margin of just two. In a year where the pure section runs hard, that margin feels thin. The robust configuration for most candidates is pure as the main engine, with at least one of mechanics or statistics trained to exam standard as a release valve for the day Section A does not cooperate.

Why OCR advises against attempting more than six

If extra attempts cost nothing on the mark sheet, why not attempt eight and take out insurance? The arithmetic answers the question. Three hours is 180 minutes. Spread across eight attempts, each question gets roughly 22 minutes; concentrated on six, each gets close to 30. STEP questions are long, multi-part climbs that demand sustained chains of algebraic manipulation, and 22 minutes typically buys you the early parts only, which means the early marks only.

180 minutes

The whole three-hour paper

About 22 minutes

Average per question if you spread across eight

Close to 30 minutes

Average per question if you concentrate on six

	Eight shallow attempts	Six deeper attempts
Average time per question	About 22 minutes	Close to 30 minutes
Assumed marks per attempt	12	16
Best-six total	72	96
Against the published 2026 STEP 2 boundaries	Sits at grade 1, which began at 62	Clears the S boundary of 84

The 12 and 16 are figures assumed for the sake of illustration, not official data or a statistical finding; the gap between the two columns is a full grade.

One clarification is worth making. The advice concerns questions you invest real time in. Reading all twelve at the start, or writing two exploratory lines before abandoning a question, is not attempting a seventh question in any meaningful sense, and the opening read-through is positively necessary. What you are avoiding is the version of the exam where questions seven and eight each swallow twenty minutes and each stalls around ten marks.

OCR's own guidance points the same way: attempting more than six is not advised, and candidates who do so rarely score as well as those who concentrate on six. You are not collecting half-finished pieces; you are trying to hand in six well-made ones.

Part 2 of 3

Sections 04 to 06

The first 10 to 15 minutes: read all twelve questions

The best use of the first 10 to 15 minutes is not mathematics but reconnaissance: read all twelve questions before committing to any. That is roughly seven per cent of the exam spent deciding how the other ninety-three per cent will go, and it is the highest-return investment available to you.

01Step 1

Read all twelve

Do not start solving; read the whole paper before deciding where to begin.

02Step 2

Tag each question

Yes: you can see a route to the end. Maybe: the early parts look secure, the later parts uncertain. No: unfamiliar territory or tools you have not practised.

03Step 3

Fix your batting order

When the read-through ends, you should hold a definite order of play, and you begin with the surest question on your list.

Two habits improve the quality of the tagging. First, read whole questions, including the later parts: STEP questions are built so that early parts feed later ones, and the structure of the parts is often a map of the intended solution, so judging a question by its first line is how misgrading happens. Second, remember what OCR says about the style of the questions: they apply mathematical knowledge in novel and unfamiliar ways and frequently cut across several specification topics, demanding insight, ingenuity and persistence.

First impressions deceive in both directions. A strange-looking question may have a familiar engine under the bonnet, and a comfortable opening can turn sharply at part three. Treat your tags as an initial ranking to be revised, not a verdict.

Rank by confidence and switch freely: moving on is cheap

Working in descending order of confidence does two jobs at once: it banks your most reliable marks early, and a clean opening settles the nerves for the harder middle of the paper. The other half of the strategy is the courage to switch.

The marking principle here is documented and worth internalising: examiners reward good progress towards a solution even when the final answer is wrong, and a correct answer earns full marks whatever the method used.

Marks already earned

You keep them

A question abandoned halfway keeps every mark it has earned

Best-six eligibility

Retained automatically

It stays in the pool your best six are chosen from

Action required

None at all

You never nominate which attempts should count

The one thing not to do

Do not cross it out

Everything left uncrossed is marked

Switching costs far less than it feels like it costs. The genuinely expensive thing is sunk-cost thinking, the reluctance to leave a question because twenty-five minutes have already gone into it. A useful discipline is a hard trigger: if a fixed number of minutes passes with no real progress (no new equation, no reduction, no part completed), you switch, mark the question as one to return to, and come back only once your core set is secure. Never cross out an abandoned attempt: those stranded lines of working may quietly be worth several marks.

Cutting up three hours: think in 30-minute units

Here is a workable frame that cuts the 180 minutes into three parts. Thirty minutes per question is the right order of magnitude, not a fixed ration: some questions will close in 18 minutes and some will deserve 40. What matters is that the average lands in the 26-to-30 band.

About 12 minutes

The opening read-through

About 158 minutes

Solving: six questions at roughly 26 minutes each

10 minutes

Reserved for final checks

0190 minutes in

First checkpoint

At this point you want two to three questions substantially complete. If you have only one, your selection ran too ambitious or you overstayed on a single question, and the second half should aim for breadth of progress marks rather than complete solutions.

02Final 30 minutes

Second checkpoint

Only open a new question if it is short or you can already see the route; otherwise return to questions you have progressed and finish an unclaimed part, close a final step, or tighten a justification.

03Last 10 minutes

Procedural check

Page markings, legibility, final answers simplified. None of that earns new marks, but it stops marks you have already earned from leaking away.

Three to five extra marks on an existing attempt are almost always cheaper than starting from zero. And near STEP boundaries a handful of marks is frequently a grade.

III

Part 3 of 3

Sections 07 to 09

Working back from the 2026 boundaries: what your six must look like

STEP publishes its grade boundaries every year, which means a target grade converts directly into a picture of what your six answers must look like. Take 2026: the published boundaries and the proportion of candidates reaching them were as follows.

	STEP 2	STEP 3
Maximum mark	120	120
S boundary	84	80
Grade 1	62	56
Grade 2	52	48
Reached grade 1 or better in 2026	28.14%	35.73%
Reached S in 2026	8.27%	9.27%

Boundaries and cumulative percentages as published in OCR's explanation of the 2026 STEP results.

The conversions below are arithmetic based on 20 marks for a complete question, a way of translating a grade into a shape of answers; they are not an official definition of what a grade means.

Grade 1 on STEP 2 (62)

About three complete questions plus change

Three full solutions give 60, so a couple of marks anywhere clears the line

Grade 1 on STEP 3 (56)

Below the value of three complete questions

Three complete questions would already be 60

Grade 2 on STEP 2 (52)

Roughly two complete questions plus one solid half

Warwick's STEP route asks for grade 2 in any one paper

S on STEP 2 (84)

Averaging 14 out of 20 across six answers

Typically four near-perfect solutions and two substantial halves

S on STEP 3 (80)

Exactly four complete questions' worth

Four answers at 20 marks each

Two caveats. First, boundaries move with the cohort, since they are set against the places available at Cambridge, Warwick and Imperial, so treat these figures as a scale rather than a promise. Second, start from your offer: Cambridge's minimum offer level is grade 1 in both papers, so fix the grade you actually need first, then work backwards to how many near-20 answers your six must contain.

The 30-second judgement: built only on past papers

In the exam, the time available to judge whether a question is yours works out at perhaps 30 to 60 seconds per question. That judgement cannot be taught in the abstract; it is trained on past papers, and it can be trained deliberately rather than left to grow as a by-product of practice.

01Step 1

Ten minutes to read and predict a ranking

Take a past STEP 2 or STEP 3 paper, give yourself ten minutes to read all twelve questions, and write down a predicted ranking.

02Step 2

Sit the paper under timed conditions

Then sit the paper under full timed conditions.

03Step 3

Set prediction against outcome

Afterwards, set your predicted ranking against your actual scores and log every misjudgement: did you overrate a question because it looked familiar, or underrate one because its setting was strange?

04Step 4

Read the log after a dozen papers

After a dozen papers the log will show your personal bias pattern, and both the speed and the accuracy of your triage will climb.

STEP Support Programme

Developed by the Cambridge Faculty of Mathematics, free and open to everyone

Modules, hints and full solutions

Official worked solutions

For STEP 2 and STEP 3 papers from 2019 onwards

The recommendation is to sit timed papers after finishing the STEP 3 modules

STEP 1

Not offered from the June 2021 sitting onwards

Old STEP 1 papers are fine as warm-up material

The twelve-into-six rehearsal must happen on full STEP 2 and STEP 3 papers, because only there does the difficulty distribution match what you will face. Timed full papers are precisely where selection instinct gets built.

Exam-room mechanics: booklet rules that protect your strategy

Several answer-booklet rules interlock with selection strategy, and they are worth knowing cold before the day.

Rough paper

None provided

All working goes inside the official answer booklet; extra paper attached is removed and not marked

Crossed-out work

Not marked

Unless you clearly indicate that you want it marked; everything left uncrossed is marked and competes for your best six

Page markings

Required on every page you write on

A missed marking can leave that work unassessed, so it belongs on your final ten-minute list

Pen and pencil

Answers in black pen, diagrams sketched in pencil

The specification requires solutions to be clear, logical and legible

Calculators and formulae

Neither is available

Calculators are not permitted and no formulae booklet is issued; the formulae you are expected to know are listed in the specification's appendix

Do not cross out an abandoned attempt. Crossed-out work is not marked unless you clearly indicate that you want it marked, and those half-finished lines may be free marks.

The no-rough-paper rule also changes how you practise: solving on scrap and copying up neatly does not transfer to STEP, because your exploration happens on the official page, so practise thinking on paper legibly from the start. The calculator ban feeds back into triage, since every computation a question demands will be done by hand, so weigh the computational load during the read-through. And marks may be lost where examiners cannot follow the working, even with a correct final answer. Selection strategy puts your time in the right places; these mechanics make sure every minute you invest is converted into marks.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Do you only answer six questions in STEP, or are all attempts counted?

It is not a choose-six system. Every question you attempt is marked, and your total is the sum of your six best-scoring answers (each out of 20, maximum 120). Extra attempts are not void; they simply do not count beyond your best six.

Is there a penalty for attempting more than six STEP questions?

There is no mark penalty and everything is marked. But OCR explicitly advises against attempting more than six, noting that candidates who do so rarely score as well as those who concentrate on six: with time spread thin, every attempt stalls in its early parts and the best-six total ends up lower.

How long should I spend on each STEP question?

Think in units of roughly 30 minutes per question: spend 10 to 15 of the 180 minutes reading and ranking all twelve, leaving about 160 minutes for six questions at 26 to 30 minutes each, with 10 minutes reserved for final checks. That is an average, not a ration; 18 minutes on one question and 40 on another is normal.

What should I do if a STEP question stalls halfway, and should I cross it out?

Switch to another question and do not cross out your working. Marking rewards progress towards a solution, so the lines you have written keep their marks and stay in the best-six pool automatically. Crossed-out work is not marked unless you clearly indicate otherwise, so crossing out throws away marks you may already have earned.

How many questions do I need to solve for a grade 1 in STEP?

Using the published 2026 boundaries as a scale: grade 1 on STEP 2 was 62 out of 120, about three complete questions (60 marks) plus change, while grade 1 on STEP 3 was 56, below the value of three full questions. S is far more demanding: 84 on STEP 2 means averaging 14 out of 20 across six answers. Boundaries move each year with the cohort, so treat these as reference points, not fixed thresholds.

Can I answer only pure questions in STEP and skip mechanics and statistics?

The rules allow it: there is no restriction on how many questions you attempt from any section, and Section A offers eight pure questions, enough for six with two spare. But that margin is thin, and in a year where the pure section runs hard you have no fallback. The safer configuration is pure as your main engine with at least one of mechanics or statistics trained to exam standard.

SOURCES

Official sources

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