How to balance difficulty across a question paper

Most difficulty problems in a question paper aren't about any single question being too hard or too easy — they're about clustering. Ten questions can each be individually reasonable and still add up to a paper that's brutal in the first ten minutes and trivial for the last twenty.

The fix isn't a stricter difficulty label on each question. It's sequencing: open with something every prepared student can answer in under a minute, so nobody freezes before they've even started. Then let difficulty rise gradually within each section rather than jumping straight to the hardest question in the chapter.

A useful check once a paper is assembled: cover the difficulty tags and read it start to finish as a student would. If the pacing feels like a rollercoaster, the tags were probably right and the ordering was wrong.

This is also why we don't treat "marks split" and "difficulty split" as the same lever. A 1-mark question can be conceptually harder than a 5-mark one that's really just a memorised derivation — marks measure how much writing a question needs, not how much it makes a student think.