Difficulty Verdict: Balanced but Conceptually Rigorous

The May/June 2024 AS Physics exam suite sits comfortably as a standard, fair assessment of the 9702 syllabus. It is rated a 3.2 out of 5 in terms of difficulty. While computational questions on kinematics, resistivity, and Hooke's Law provided reliable pathways to secure marks, the narrative explanation questions in Paper 22 required highly structured logical links that tripped up candidates who relied solely on rote equation memorisation.

Where the Marks are Concentrated

A substantial portion of the exam’s total marks lay in the Work, Energy, and Power and D.C. Circuits / Potential Dividers chapters. Candidates who mastered energy conversions—such as calculating the speed of a projectile by equating elastic potential energy to the sum of kinetic and gravitational potential energy \( E_K + \Delta E_P = E_{elastic} \)—gained a strong advantage. In Superposition, the diffraction grating remains a high-yielding topic, requiring precision in calculating total visible orders of interference.

Examiner Pitfalls and Where Marks Were Lost

Examiner reports highlighted several persistent areas of concern:

  • Unit Conversion Blunders: Many candidates failed to convert millimetres (mm) to metres (m) when evaluating the area of the solar panel or calculating wire resistivity.
  • Diffraction Grating Over-simplification: In Paper 22 Question 6, candidates frequently calculated the maximum order of diffraction \( n \) correctly but forgot to double it and add the zero-order maximum to find the total number of bright fringes (\( 2n + 1 \)).
  • Vague Explanations: For potential divider changes (e.g., Question 5b), candidates often skipped step-by-step links. To secure full marks, students must explicitly connect a resistance change to a change in total circuit resistance, then to the current, and finally to the potential difference across the fixed component.

Revision Strategy and Topic Predictions

Future candidates should focus heavily on multi-step energy conservation scenarios and graphical calculus (drawing precise tangents to obtain acceleration). Given the light testing of the Doppler Effect for sound and Polarisation (Malus's Law) in this series, these areas are highly anticipated to feature as major quantitative structured questions in upcoming examinations.