QCE General Mathematics IA2 and IA3 examinations: how to get top marks

IA2 and IA3 are the same exam on different units: IA2 samples Unit 3, IA3 samples Unit 4, and each is worth 15% of your subject result. Both are unseen short-response papers, 5 minutes perusal and 90 minutes working, marked on a single criterion out of 15 by converting your raw score to a percentage and reading it off a fixed cut-off ladder. Each step on that ladder is 6 to 7 percentage points wide, so half a mark on one question can move your criterion mark a whole point.

This guide describes the General Mathematics 2025 v1.0 General senior syllabus, current for Year 12 from 2026. Every subject report published so far (2022 to 2025 cohorts) describes students assessed under the superseded 2019 v1.2 rules, so the statistics below are labelled with their cohort year and none of them describes marking under the current marking guide. What does carry across unchanged is the cut-off ladder itself, which has identical thresholds in both versions.

What both examinations are

QCAA's specification is the same sentence for each, with the unit swapped. Your teacher writes an examination that:

asks students to respond to a number of unseen short response questions; representatively samples subject matter from any three of the five topics in Unit 3 [Unit 4 for IA3]; may ask students to respond using single words, sentences or paragraphs; may ask students to interpret unseen stimulus, calculate using algorithms, draw or label graphs, tables or diagrams, use assumed knowledge from previous units

Conditions, identical for both:

Both papers assess all six assessment objectives, from recalling mathematical knowledge through to solving mathematical problems, and both are marked on one criterion worth 15 marks.

General Mathematics has no technology-free requirement anywhere in its assessment. Both the Mathematical Methods and Specialist Mathematics syllabuses require their internal exams to carry technology-free and technology-active questions and set Paper 1 of the external exam with no calculator at all. The General Mathematics syllabus asks only that you use technology, so there is no no-calculator paper to prepare for.

IA2: the Unit 3 examination

IA2 samples any three of the five Unit 3 topics:

• Bivariate data analysis 1 and Bivariate data analysis 2
• Time series analysis
• Growth and decay in sequences
• Earth geometry and time zones

It may also draw on assumed knowledge from Units 1 and 2, so Pythagoras, trigonometric ratios, rates, percentages and univariate statistics are all fair game inside a Unit 3 question.

Since you cannot know which three topics your school will choose, revising four of the five is the only strategy the specification leaves you. Under the 2019 syllabus every topic had to appear, which made the paper more predictable and each topic thinner.

IA3: the Unit 4 examination

IA3 samples any three of the five Unit 4 topics:

• Loans, investments and annuities 1 and Loans, investments and annuities 2
• Graphs and networks
• Networks and decision mathematics 1
• Networks and decision mathematics 2

IA3 assumes everything from Units 1, 2 and 3, which is a wider base than IA2 gets. A Unit 4 network question can legitimately require a calculation you last met in Year 11.

How the mark is actually worked out

There is one criterion, Foundational knowledge and problem-solving, worth 15 marks. The instrument-specific marking guide, or ISMG, sets no per-criterion bands to reach and gives your teacher nothing to mark against question by question. Instead:

1. Your school writes a marking scheme, its own per-question breakdown of where each mark sits. This is a separate document from the ISMG, and it goes to QCAA at confirmation, the check QCAA runs on a sample of every school's marking after the papers are sat.
2. Your teacher marks your paper against that scheme and totals your raw marks.
3. Your raw total becomes a percentage of the paper total.
4. That percentage is matched against a fixed ladder to give your mark out of 15.

Eight descriptor blocks cover fifteen marks, so the prose never decides your mark on its own. Two adjacent marks share a descriptor word for word. The percentage is the only thing separating them.

The situational range narrows as you go down. Complex unfamiliar disappears from the descriptor below 12, complex familiar disappears below 10, and from 7 downward the descriptor stops mentioning evaluation and application at all, leaving only recall and communication.

Each step covers roughly 6 to 7 percentage points. On a 50-mark paper that is about three marks per step, so three questions where you skipped the working, or one where you never wrote the conclusion, is the difference between a 13 and a 12.

The 60/20/20 blueprint

Every IA2, every IA3 and the external examination are built to the same question specification, within ±2%:

Three fifths of every paper is simple familiar. Securing those marks is what puts you in the middle of the ladder; the top four marks are unreachable without the complex unfamiliar 20%, because the descriptor at 12 and above names all three situation types.

What a full-mark response contains

There is no essay to compare here, so the annotated excerpts QCAA reproduces are photographs of handwritten working with ticks and half-marks on them. The same four habits earn the marks in every one of them.

Show reasoning on anything worth more than one mark. QCAA states this in its external-assessment advice in 2023, 2024 and 2025, and applies it throughout the IA excerpts. A five-mark response has to supply evidence for five separate mark-allocation statements in your school's scheme.

State the rule, identify the values, then substitute, in that order. From an IA3 excerpt in the 2025 report awarded full marks, each half-mark annotated on the page:

Finish with a conclusion sentence that answers the question in context, with units. Every full-mark excerpt across all four reports does this, and the "∴" line carries a half mark of its own in the excerpt above.

Make Objective 4 visible. Evaluating the reasonableness of solutions is one of the six objectives every paper assesses, and QCAA tells schools repeatedly that it is under-assessed. In the marked excerpts, a reasonableness mark is earned by comparing your answer against an explicit reference value or constraint, not by asserting that it seems right:

Both name the specific thing that makes the answer unreasonable: an outlier in the data, a landmass in the way. A sentence saying the result "seems sensible" names nothing and earns nothing.

What the 2025 syllabus put back in scope

Four things a 2019-era revision list gets backwards, all named as key differences in the 2025 report:

• The Hungarian algorithm now runs 3×3 up to 5×5 square matrices. Under 2019, reports told schools three years running not to go beyond 3×3.
• Constructing a graph or digraph from a given adjacency matrix is a new dot point. It was explicitly out of bounds before.
• Project network diagrams are activity on arc and exclude dummy activities.
• Flow network problems are bounded at up to 8 possible cuts.

The first two are the ones that bite, because advice written for the old bounds now understates what IA3 can ask of you.

Common mistakes

Hunting for band descriptors to write towards. There is nothing to reach for in the ISMG wording. Two students on the same descriptor can be a mark apart, decided by percentage alone, so the only lever is picking up individual marks across the whole paper.

Leaving the working out because the calculator did it. You are required to use technology, and a technology-produced answer with nothing around it evidences one mark-allocation statement at best. Write the rule and the substituted values even when the calculator handles the arithmetic.

Rounding early in an annuity or compound-interest chain. QCAA names this in the 2022 and 2024 reports. Money rounds to the nearest cent at the end, not partway through.

Skipping the conclusion sentence. It reads as a formality and it is frequently the marked half mark.

Assuming the paper covers everything on the unit. It samples three topics of five. Two topics you revised hard may simply not appear, which is an argument for breadth over depth in the fortnight before.

How reliably these papers get marked

Once your school's paper is approved, the mark you are given is almost certainly the mark you keep. Confirmation agreement between school marks and QCAA-confirmed marks ran 97.77%, 97.1%, 100.00% and 100.00% on IA2 across the 2022 to 2025 cohorts, and 97.99%, 99.33%, 100.00% and 100.00% on IA3.

Getting the paper approved in the first place is the hard part. Endorsement, the approval QCAA gives a school's paper before anyone sits it, was granted at first application to 35%, 42%, 49% and 46% of IA2 papers and 39%, 40%, 37% and 44% of IA3 papers across those four cohorts, against 70%, 73%, 64% and 74% for the IA1 modelling task. Fewer than half of all internal maths exams passed at first application in any of the four years, and alignment to the syllabus specifications was the dominant reason every year. It explains why the paper you sit has usually been rewritten at least once.

Where our data lines up with QCAA's advice

QCAA does not publish a score per topic. Our own figures do, with two caveats: they come from external examination questions and not from school-written IA papers, and those papers were all sat under the superseded 2019 v1.2 syllabus. So they describe the content, not this instrument. Two of them corroborate practices QCAA names in the reports.

Across 740 marked attempts on AusGrader, students average 50.1% on deseasonalising a time series by calculating seasonal indices with the average percentage method, which QCAA lists as a practice to strengthen in 2023, 2024 and 2025. Across 404 attempts, students average 46.1% on constructing a project network diagram, the content behind the 2025 report's advice on distinguishing earliest and latest start times. The full picture across all topics and cognitive verbs is on the General Mathematics study guide.

In the room

There's no draft to check, so treat this as a routine per question:

• How many marks is this worth, and how many separate points does the scheme therefore need to see?
• Have I written the rule and the substituted values, not just the calculator output?
• Is my final line a sentence that answers the question, in context, with units?
• If the question asks whether something is reasonable, have I named the specific value or constraint I compared against?
• If I made an error two lines up, is my working visible enough that follow-through credit can reach the end?
• Have I written the question number on any additional page, and cancelled superseded work with a single diagonal line so the original is not the version marked?

Ready to practise? Work through unseen General Mathematics questions on the General Mathematics question bank, see how the internal exams fit alongside everything else on the QCE General Mathematics study guide, or read how the very differently marked IA1 problem-solving and modelling task is judged, where four criteria and a set of band descriptors decide your 20 marks instead of one percentage. The QCE hub has the other subjects.