How do gcse results look like

As per the guide below, issued by the exams regulator Ofqual, the numerical system essentially boils down to the following:. Under the numerical system relatively few students should be achieving grade 9s in normal years, as they will effectively be rationed. Year 11 students can collect their grades on Thursday 12 August from 8. Unlike last year where results were distributed electronically due to the Covid pandemic, the results can be collected from the school in-person this time around.

It should be no harder or easier to achieve a particular grade than it is in a normal year when examinations take place. What are the new grades? How have teachers decided GCSE results? What do pupils need to pass their exams? Image source, Getty Images. Why were the grades changed? What's happening in Northern Ireland? There are some changes in Northern Ireland too. But the 2. Individual schools decided how teachers came up with final grades. They could base their decisions on a number of different aspects, including:.

Pupils were told which pieces of work counted towards their grades. They already knew the results of most of the individual pieces of work, but teachers should not have told them their final grade before today. In Wales, students were given their provisional grade in June , ahead of official results day. Exam boards have been checking the schools' marking methods to make sure they follow official guidance.

They may also have asked schools for a sample of their results to check that grades are not significantly out of line with previous years. If you are disappointed with your result, you can opt to re-take that subject in the autumn. This would involve sitting formal exams. You should speak to your school about deadlines and how to proceed. If you do decide to sit an exam in the autumn and you receive a higher mark than your teacher-assessed grade, it will count as your final result.

UK, remember your settings and improve government services. We also use cookies set by other sites to help us deliver content from their services. You can change your cookie settings at any time. It would not have been fair for exams to take place in the usual way. Instead, grades were determined by teachers based on a range of evidence. These were known as teacher assessed grades, or TAGs.

Since, the pandemic caused different levels of disruption across the country, many schools and colleges had not been able to teach all the course content. In response, students were only assessed on the content they had been taught while ensuring sufficient coverage of the curriculum to enable progression. This flexibility was to accommodate on-going disruption to teaching including school closures and the need for students and teachers to self-isolate.

Schools and colleges put in place internal quality assurance processes. They were required to make sure at least 2 people were involved in each judgement and the head of each school or college had to sign off the grades.

Teachers and senior leaders in schools and colleges have worked hard to make sure that judgements were made, quality assured and submitted on time. Where exam boards had concerns, these were followed up with the school or college and in some cases, teachers reconsidered their judgements and submitted revised grades.

These assessment arrangements are quite unlike those typically used. Normally students sit the same assessments, often exams, at the same time and under the same conditions, and they are marked and graded in the same way. Without the mechanisms usually used to secure standards over time and between students, outcomes this year look different from previous years - as we expected they would. There has been an increase in outcomes at the top grades and the stability at lower grades.

This may be because the most academically able students were even more able to study independently. There are some small changes in the gaps between the average results of some groups of students, which are observed in normal years, which may reflect the impact of the pandemic on learning.