STEP
What is STEP?
STEP, or Sixth Term Examination Paper, is a math admissions paper sat by A-level students or equivalent. This paper is used to examine students' mathematical aptitude and is required by universities such as:
- Cambridge, Mathematics, with a typical offer being 1 in each paper
- Imperial College London, Computer science, with a typical offer being 2 in any step
There are two STEP papers; STEP II and STEP III. They each contain 12 questions; 8 pure questions, 2 mechanics questions, 2 probability and statistics questions. Papers are supposed to be equal in difficulty, however STEP II uses A-level math content and AS further math content whereas STEP III uses both A-level math content and A2 further math content. This basically means that anything that comes up in STEP II can also come up in STEP III, however not everything that comes up in STEP III can come up in STEP II. In these tests, a calculator and formula booklet are not permitted and the test is graded out of the student's 6 best answered questions. The paper is out of 120 marks, each question carrying the same amount of credit, in the case that a student answers more than 6 questions, only their best 6 attempts will be taken. It should be noted that 4 full solutions or "fulls" are enough to get a grade 1 in any year.
Resources
General Resources
Grade boundaries for previous years
Solutions and advice
Questions and problem solving
Physics and math tutor, 1987 - 2021 papers
Step database, questions by year and topic
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