this was a end of year 11 exam btw. TASK 1
here are some possible reasons why the average is so low, since i doubt it has much to do with it being of high difficulty:
1. bad cohort (possible, but unlikely)
2. bad/incomplete teaching (so for future tasks, students would know to self study more to improve)
3. lack of experience (since its the first task, it might simply be that students are still getting their bearings in terms of how to approach the subject)
4. lack of practicing past exams and completing textbook work (past exams would have exposed the students to the question types provided in the exam)
5. underestimating the exam's difficulty (some students might have assumed the test would have been stupidly easy, and decided to spend their time only studying the basics)
6. inadequate time alloted (students would have just started yr11, and so might not have realised the workload that mx2 requires for them to gain high marks. or, they might have spent all their time preparing for other subjects as they believed that their mx2 exam would be very easy or simply were very stressed in other subjects' work such as depth studies, leading back to reason 5 possibly)
theres many more but i have doubts about the difficulty of the paper as u are saying. at my school, this also happened in the first task, where i think me and one other person received a very similar mark of around 70%, whereas much of the cohort received a mark around 50%. our paper did have some hard questions but id say it wasnt super super difficult, overall most of my cohort improved from task 1 in later exams as we began to better understand our strengths and weaknesses and how much time we needed to study to succeed in mx2, as well as just developing greater intuition and exam technique, and understanding that we should do all the easy questions first, then spend a long time thinking about the hard questions, how to squeeze out marks where we can by doing a lot of trials and understanding their marking criteria, etc.
overall im just trying to say a low average doesnt necessarily mean a bad cohort or a super hard exam, there are many other factors at play
