AQA's own per-paper boundaries for June 2026, what each of the three papers can actually be set from, and the 15 May 2027 practical deadline.
Book a Free ConsultationAQA A-level Biology 7402 is a linear qualification assessed entirely by three written papers sat at the end of Year 13, worth 91, 91 and 78 marks against a total of 260. Its papers are not interchangeable: Paper 1 can be set only from topics 1 to 4, Paper 2 only from topics 5 to 8. In June 2026 a grade A took 174 of those 260 marks.
Already in Year 13 on AQA 7402? Our expert A-level Biology tutors work paper by paper with Year 13 students, building each programme around a student's own mock marks on Papers 1, 2 and 3 rather than a single overall percentage.
A parent who looks up grade boundaries for AQA Biology finds two different sets of numbers for the same qualification. One is the subject row: the marks out of 260 that took each grade. The other is a set of three per-paper rows, one for each component. They do not reconcile at every grade, and the reason is published by AQA rather than being an error in either set.
These are the confirmed figures for the June 2026 series, with the three component rows added together in the final column so the gap is visible.
| Grade | Subject (of 260) | 7402/1 (of 91) | 7402/2 (of 91) | 7402/3 (of 78) | Three papers added |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A* | 199 | 70 | 70 | 59 | 199 |
| A | 174 | 61 | 62 | 51 | 174 |
| B | 146 | 51 | 51 | 43 | 145 |
| C | 118 | 42 | 40 | 35 | 117 |
| D | 90 | 33 | 29 | 28 | 90 |
| E | 63 | 24 | 18 | 21 | 63 |
Source: AQA, A-level grade boundaries June 2026, and AQA specification 7402 scheme of assessment. Retrieved 26 September 2026.
At A*, A, D and E the three papers add to exactly the published subject boundary. At B they add to 145 against a subject boundary of 146, and at C to 117 against 118. In both cases the components fall one mark short.
AQA addresses this directly in its own guide to component boundaries. It states that “there are no official grades for individual components in linear qualifications” and that the per-paper figures “are known as ‘notional grade boundaries’, as they are for illustrative purposes only”. It then says plainly that “the notional component boundaries do not always add up to the subject grade boundaries”.
The mechanism behind that is the order in which boundaries are set. AQA describes grades A and E as judgemental grades, fixed by an awarding committee looking at students' work, with B, C and D then set arithmetically so they fall as evenly as possible between them. That arithmetic is carried out once for the subject and separately for each component, and two independent divisions of two different mark ranges need not land on the same total. It is consistent with what the 7402 figures show: the grades AQA sets by judgement reconcile exactly, and two of the three it fills in arithmetically are the ones a mark adrift.
For a Year 13 student the practical consequence is narrow but worth getting right. A per-paper boundary is a reading aid, not a hurdle: no grade is awarded on Paper 1, and a mark below the notional A on one paper is not a failed paper. Only the total out of 260 is awarded. The figures are still the most useful benchmark available for a mock, because they are real marks from a real series rather than a school's own estimate, but they should be added up and compared against the subject row rather than read paper by paper as a set of pass marks.
One detail makes that addition straightforward. AQA's scheme of assessment gives every component a scaling factor of one, so Paper 1's 91 raw marks are 91 scaled marks, Paper 2's 91 are 91, and Paper 3's 78 are 78. Nothing is reweighted between the paper and the total, so a student can add three mock marks straight across without converting anything first.
This is a question about what an examiner is permitted to set, not about what a school teaches and when. AQA fixes a content pool for each paper in its scheme of assessment, and two of the three pools exclude an entire year of the course. A teaching sequence can vary between schools; these pools cannot.
| Paper | What AQA says is assessed | Duration | Marks | Share of the A-level |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7402/1 | Any content from topics 1–4, including relevant practical skills | 2 hours | 91 | 35% |
| 7402/2 | Any content from topics 5–8, including relevant practical skills | 2 hours | 91 | 35% |
| 7402/3 | Any content from topics 1–8, including relevant practical skills | 2 hours | 78 | 30% |
Source: AQA specification 7402, specification at a glance. Retrieved 26 September 2026.
Topics 5 to 8 are the four topics AQA labels A-level only, so Paper 1 is sealed against everything a Year 13 student is taught during the year in which they sit it. That is 91 marks, 35% of the qualification, on which nothing from the final year can appear. The position is symmetrical: Paper 2 is sealed the other way and cannot ask about the first year at all. Only Paper 3 draws on both, which puts the first year's content in reach of 169 of the 260 marks, exactly 65%, and the second year's in reach of the same 169.
That symmetry is worth stating carefully, because it is easy to assume Year 13 content dominates a Year 13 exam series. It does not. The two years are weighted identically, and the paper a student sits first, on 7 June 2027, is the one furthest from what they have most recently been taught.
The same A-level-only boundary runs through the practical work. AQA's AS specification lists six required practicals, numbered 1 to 6; the A-level specification lists twelve, with identical wording for the first six. The remaining six therefore belong to the A-level-only content, and the specification places each of them in a named topic: practicals 7, 8 and 9 in topic 3.5, practicals 10 and 11 in topic 3.6, and practical 12 in topic 3.7. Topic 3.8, the control of gene expression, carries no required practical at all, which makes practical 12 the last a student meets.
Those six have to be completed and signed off on the same timetable as everything else in the final year. AQA's key dates for 7402 set a non-exam assessment submission deadline of 15 May 2027 for component 7402/C, 23 days before the first written paper, and note that schools and colleges may set their own deadlines ahead of it. What the endorsement assesses, and how competence is judged, is covered in full on our AQA A-Level Biology page, which lists all twelve practicals and the criteria they are marked against.
Sitting Papers 1, 2 and 3 in June 2027? Our expert A-level Biology tutors help Year 13 students on AQA 7402 work on first-year and second-year content separately, because Paper 1 and Paper 2 test them separately.
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Beyond the content pools, AQA gives each paper exactly one named 15-mark question, and the three are different formats. They are the only question types the specification names by number of marks, which makes them the most predictable part of the series.
| Paper | The rest of the paper | The named 15-mark question |
|---|---|---|
| 7402/1 | 76 marks: a mixture of short and long answer questions | 15 marks: extended response questions |
| 7402/2 | 76 marks: a mixture of short and long answer questions | 15 marks: comprehension question |
| 7402/3 | 38 marks: structured questions, including practical techniques | 15 marks: critical analysis of given experimental data |
Source: AQA specification 7402, specification at a glance. Retrieved 26 September 2026.
Together those three questions carry 45 of the 260 marks, 17.3% of the A-level, and each is sat once. A student who is strong on short-answer recall and has never practised a comprehension question is exposed on 45 marks of the qualification without it showing up in topic-by-topic revision, because none of the three is a topic.
The AS papers are the useful comparison here, because many Year 13 students have sat them. AQA's AS specification sets two papers of 1 hour 30 minutes and 75 marks each, built from 65 marks of short answer questions plus, on one paper, a 10-mark comprehension question and, on the other, 10 marks of extended response. So two of the three A-level formats do exist at AS, at two thirds of the marks. The critical analysis of given experimental data does not: it appears nowhere in the AS specification, and a student meets it for the first time on Paper 3 in Year 13. The full structure of Paper 3, and how the synoptic paper compares with the other boards, is set out on our A-Level Biology guide.
The AS comparison carries one caveat. An AS result is a separate qualification on its own mark scale and contributes nothing to the A-level grade, so an AS paper is useful as format practice and not as a predictor. Our Year 12 AQA A-Level Biology page covers the AS route and what it does and does not decide.
Our expert A-level Biology tutors work with Year 13 students on AQA 7402 paper by paper, because the specification splits the course that way and a single overall percentage hides which half is weak. The first session starts from a real script rather than a topic checklist: a recent mock, marked against the published June 2026 notional boundaries for 7402/1, 7402/2 and 7402/3, so the programme is built on where the marks were actually lost.
That diagnosis usually separates two different problems. A student short of the notional 61 on Paper 1 has a first-year content gap, and the work is consolidation of topics 1 to 4 alongside whatever the school is currently teaching. A student short of the notional 62 on Paper 2 is behind on the A-level-only topics being taught in the same term, which is a pacing problem rather than a revision one and is handled differently. A student even across both, and short only on Paper 3, usually needs work on the question formats rather than on content at all.
Sessions are then weighted towards whichever of those the marks point at, rather than moving through the specification in order. Where a student is on a medicine or biosciences route, our tutors also cover AQA A-Level Chemistry alongside Biology, which is the common second subject. For families comparing boards, our Year 13 Edexcel A-Level Biology page sets out the equivalent picture on 9BN0 and 9BI0, and our A-level tuition pages cover every subject a Year 13 student might be taking.
Our expert A-level Biology tutors help Year 13 students across the UK with AQA 7402, working on Paper 1 and Paper 2 content separately and on the three named 15-mark questions that do not appear in topic revision.
No. AQA's scheme of assessment restricts Paper 1 to any content from topics 1 to 4, including relevant practical skills, and topics 5 to 8 are the four topics AQA labels A-level only. Paper 1 is worth 91 marks and 35% of the A-level, and a Year 13 student sits it on 7 June 2027 having been taught none of its content that year. A weak Paper 1 mock is therefore a Year 12 content problem rather than evidence of falling behind in the final year, and it is diagnosed and fixed differently.
AQA awards grades on marks rather than percentages, so the honest answer is a mark. In the June 2026 series a grade A on 7402 took 174 of the 260 available marks, which is 66.9%, and a grade B took 146. A student on 67% of the total would have been just above that series' A boundary. Boundaries are set after each series once the papers have been marked, so a percentage from one year is never a reliable target for the next.
Because AQA publishes them as an illustration rather than as awards. AQA states that there are no official grades for individual components in linear qualifications, that the per-paper figures are for illustrative purposes only, and that the notional component boundaries do not always add up to the subject grade boundaries. On 7402 in June 2026 the three papers summed to 145 at grade B against a published subject boundary of 146, and to 117 at C against 118, while A*, A, D and E summed exactly.
No, although this is often stated incorrectly. AQA weights Paper 1 at 35%, Paper 2 at 35% and Paper 3 at 30% of the A-level, matching their raw marks of 91, 91 and 78 against a total of 260. Every component carries a scaling factor of one, so the raw marks are also the scaled marks and a student can add mock marks straight across the three papers without weighting them first.
Numbers 7 to 12. AQA's AS specification lists exactly six required practicals, numbered 1 to 6, and its A-level specification lists twelve, with identical wording for the first six. The remaining six sit in the A-level-only topics: practicals 7, 8 and 9 in topic 3.5, practicals 10 and 11 in topic 3.6, and practical 12 in topic 3.7. Topic 3.8, the control of gene expression, carries no required practical at all.
15 May 2027. AQA's key dates for 7402 list a non-exam assessment submission deadline for component 7402/C on that date, and add that schools and colleges may set their own deadlines, which are usually earlier. The AQA deadline falls 23 days before the first written paper on 7 June 2027, so the endorsement is settled and submitted before the written exams begin rather than alongside them.
AQA's key dates for 7402 give three papers on three dates: 7402/1 on 7 June 2027 in the afternoon, 7402/2 on 14 June 2027 in the afternoon, and 7402/3 on 18 June 2027 in the morning. Each paper runs two hours. Paper 2 falls exactly one week after Paper 1, and Paper 3 follows four days after Paper 2, so two of the three papers fall in the same week.
Each paper carries exactly one named 15-mark question and all three are different formats. Paper 1 sets 15 marks of extended response questions, Paper 2 sets a 15-mark comprehension question, and Paper 3 sets 15 marks of critical analysis of given experimental data. Together they account for 45 of the 260 marks, or 17.3% of the A-level. Of the three, only the critical analysis has no counterpart on an AS paper.
Our expert A-level Biology tutors help Year 13 students on AQA 7402 use the months before the June 2027 papers on the content and question formats their own mock marks point at.
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