Calculators in IGCSE Maths: It Depends Which Paper

Cambridge 0580: half the qualification without one

Since the 2025 series, each 0580 route contains one non-calculator paper and one calculator paper, and both carry 50%. Core candidates sit Paper 1 without a calculator and Paper 3 with a scientific one. Extended candidates sit Paper 2 without and Paper 4 with.

That is a larger share of unaided arithmetic than a GCSE candidate faces. At Edexcel or AQA GCSE, one paper in three is non-calculator — a third of the marks. At Cambridge Extended it is one paper in two, and that paper runs for two hours and carries 100 marks.

• 0580 Paper 1 (Core) — no calculator
• 0580 Paper 2 (Extended) — no calculator
• 0580 Paper 3 (Core) — scientific calculator required
• 0580 Paper 4 (Extended) — scientific calculator required

0607 is the one that breaks every assumption

Cambridge International Mathematics 0607 is a different syllabus with a different calculator requirement, and families often discover this after buying the wrong machine. It does not ask for a scientific calculator on its calculator papers. It asks for a graphic display calculator, and the syllabus is written on the assumption that candidates have one.

Papers 1 and 2 are sat without a calculator, as in 0580. Papers 3, 4, 5 and 6 — the calculator papers and the investigation papers — require the graphic display model. A student entered for 0607 who prepares on a scientific calculator will be unable to answer parts of the paper that assume graphing, not merely slower at them.

Edexcel International GCSE has no non-calculator paper at all

Edexcel International GCSE Mathematics A, 4MA1, sets two papers of 2 hours and 100 marks each and permits a calculator in both. There is no non-calculator paper anywhere in the qualification, which is the single largest structural difference between it and the domestic GCSE.

This is worth naming plainly because "IGCSE" gets used as though it named one exam. It does not. A student moving from 4MA1 to 0580 Extended loses calculator access for half the marks, and the arithmetic that change exposes has usually not been practised for two years.

What to check before buying anything

Ask the school for the syllabus code on the entry — 0580, 0980, 0607 or 4MA1 — before choosing a calculator, and ask which paper numbers the candidate is entered for. Those two facts settle the question entirely, and neither can be inferred from the textbook or from what the year above used.

Then practise on the machine that will be in the exam. In our IGCSE groups the non-calculator papers get a separate weekly slot from the calculator ones, because they are separate skills: one rewards fluent written arithmetic and exact-form answers, the other rewards knowing your own keypad well enough not to look at it.

The students who suffer most are the ones who never draw the distinction. They practise every topic with a calculator to hand all year, then meet a two-hour paper without one in June and discover that their method was sound and their arithmetic was borrowed.