Thousands of students are picking up their A-Level results today (August 13), a day many teenagers find daunting as they await their future prospects. Schools and colleges opened at 8am for students to collect their physical results slips, which will determine their university choices.
The Tricky Maths Question
For those wondering what it's like to sit those exams, a Paper 3 maths question has been shared online, and it's reportedly confusing adults. The 7-mark sum, posted on TikTok by user @freemathstutor_uk, who has 132,000 followers, requires a paper and pen to work through.
The question involves a team game where players solve puzzles to escape a room. Based on past data, the mean time to escape is 65 minutes with a standard deviation of 11.3 minutes. After recent changes to the puzzles, it is claimed the mean time has changed. To test this, a random sample of 100 teams is selected, and the total time for these teams is 6,780 minutes. Assuming normal distribution, the task is to test at the 2% level whether the mean time has changed.
How to Find the Solution
To solve it, you need to define the mean (the total of numbers divided by how many numbers there are) and state how the data is originally distributed. Once the setup is understood, the answer can be calculated.
If you think you have the answer, the conclusion is shared below. The tutor in the video showed his calculations before revealing the outcome. He said: "We reject the H0 (null hypothesis) and there is sufficient evidence to show the mean time has changed."
Public Reaction
The question received mixed reactions in the comments. One user said: "I'm so cooked," while another asked: "Why is the mean for the sample set still 65. Should it not be 67.8." A third simply wrote: "So easy."
According to last year's UCAS figures, the proportion of students receiving top A-Level results reached a record high. It found 28.3% of all grades across all students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland scored an A* or A in 2025.
