#EdexcelMaths

Submission 20,259

Part of a series on Mathematics. [View Related Entries]

About

#EdexcelMaths is a Twitter hashtag associated with various jokes and complaints regarding a perplexing statistics problem known as “Hannah’s sweets" which appeared in the United Kingdom’s General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) Math exam distributed by the Edexcel exam board in June 2015.

Origin

On June 4th, 2015, Twitter user @bethdedwards_^[3] posted a tweet in anticipation of taking the GCSE Math exam^[1] later that morning, including an image macro of an elderly man talking to a doctor in a hospital bed accompanied by the hashtag #EdexcelMaths (shown below).

The exam included a math problem for determining the probability of taking two orange sweets from a bag, which was subsequently referred to as "Hannah's sweets" (shown below).

Spread

That morning, many United Kingdom-based students began complaining about the exam's difficulty and mocking the Hannah's sweets question on Twitter, accompanied by the hashtag #EdexcelMaths.^[4]

The same day, a petition requesting that Edexel "reduce grade boundaries significantly" was submitted to Change.org^[2] (shown below, left). On June 5th, Twitter user @themaine4_ever^[5] posted a photograph of the "Hannah's sweets" solution written on a piece of notebook paper (shown below, right).

News Media Coverage

In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the Twitter hashtag, including Metro,^[6] BuzzFeed,^[7] The Huffington Post,^[8] Gizmodo,^[9] BBC,^[10] Telegraph^[11] and The Guardian.^[12]