This page is part of the offer-holders section for students who have been offered an undergraduate place at Christ's College.  We ask you to read this page by 9 February if you have STEP conditions because it contains important information about preparation for STEP, including the STEP Support Programme and the weekly assignments provided to support you.

Your Cambridge conditional offer may include a requirement to take one or more STEP Mathematics papers. The information on this page provides support for this – we hope that you find it useful.

About STEP Exams

Information about the STEP Mathematics Paper II and Paper III exams is available on the OCR STEP website. You take these exams in the summer and will need to prepare carefully for them.

You can read about the grades we have asked you for.

 

Online resources to help you to prepare for STEP

The STEP Support programme  is designed to help university applicants to develop their advanced problem-solving skills and prepare for sitting STEP Mathematics examinations.

The programme is developed by Cambridge University Faculty of Mathematics and NRICH. 

It consists of:

We recommend that you start working on the STEP Support Programme as soon as possible if you've not already started.

In addition to the Support Programme, there are past papers available on the OCR STEP website, and further links on our Maths subject page resources section. See in particular the recordings of live STEP workshops from last year's Open Days.

These resources are free and open to everyone.

 

Registering for STEP Exams

You will need to be registered to take STEP. Normally your school will do this if they are already a registered centre. If your school is not a registered test centre then either your school could register to become a test centre or you could find another test centre. Please see the information. 

Entries for STEP are accepted from 1 March 2024 and the standard entry deadline is 4 May 2024. Late entries are not accepted.
 

STEP Exam dates and results

Source: STEP dates and costs

 

What do students say?

"Once I had my offer I spent a lot of time doing stuff for STEP. I found it very difficult starting off – I would look at a past paper and not have a clue how to start any of the questions. It took time but I got into it, and actually started enjoying doing STEP papers. It was a long process revising for it, and I put a lot of time into it but it was worth it in the end."
James (Mathematics)

"the most useful thing you can do is practice lots of questions. There's a lot of resources online, including the STEP support programme from Cambridge and a database of practice questions. I was quite late in starting, and would have appreciated a bit more revision time. You'll probably find that preparing for STEP and practicing questions will help your A-Level revision a lot too."
James 2(!) Mathematics

"If you get the offer, start preparing for STEP immediately, and don’t ever give up despite how hard it may seem."
Maria (Mathematics)

"I expected that preparing for STEP is also helpful A-Level revision, but I didn't anticipate how useful it would be for my degree: revising for my university exams has been a similar process. Spending time getting used to questions by topic to begin with before launching yourself into mock papers has been an effective strategy for maths at all levels so far!"
Alex (Mathematics)

"The paper is daunting but puts you in a really good position once you start the course as they are effectively University-style questions using A-level content, and once you get used to the style [...] it can actually be more interesting than normal A-level past papers."
Ollie (Engineering)

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