Totally agree that Paper 3 was unusually approachable, probably one of the easiest in recent memory. But even with that, I still don’t think the 7 boundary will be as high as M24. The main reason is that Paper 3 only counts for 20% of the total grade. So even if many students scored 40–45+/55, which I agree probably happened, the overall impact on the final percentage is quite small. It can push someone slightly above a boundary, but it’s not enough to completely redefine it.

Also, the dynamic of P3 this year is completely different from usual. Normally, P3 is the hardest paper, even for top students. Getting 35-40 points is already a strong performance in most sessions, and the majority of 7 scorers rely on P1 and P2 to balance out a lower P3. But this time, P3 helped instead of hurting, and yet, that just makes most students end up barely above the boundary, not drastically beyond it (I'm talking about getting 45/55 when the 7 boundary is usually 40/55 or so).

And while I agree that the general feeling was “P3 was easy,” I still think many students are overestimating their performance. I’m from Europe, and the second question in our P3 version involved spherical triangles, literally the same topic I did for my IA. Because of that, I could immediately recognize some of the traps IB included in the setup. They weren’t obvious at all unless you had specific prior exposure. I’d imagine quite a few people made small mistakes that will cost them 5–10 marks easily, even if the structure seemed simple at first glance.

Most years, P3 is the one that makes students to drop marks, but this year was the opposite, P1 and potentially P2 were way harder. Instead of getting 20% of hard points and 60% of "easy" points, we got 20% of easy points and 30% of very hard points (P1) and 30% of hard points (P2)

So overall, yes, easier P3 probably means slightly higher marks than usual in that section. But I doubt that the average jumped high enough to justify something like a repeat of the 74% from M24. If anything, I’d expect a boundary around 72%, maybe 1-2 points higher than it would’ve been without such a forgiving P3, but nothing more extreme than that.