How GCSE and A level grading works – teachers’ and headteachers’ guide
Published 7 April 2025
Applies to England
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As teachers and school and college leaders, you play a crucial role in helping your community understand the GCSE and A level grading process. This overview will give you the technical detail you need to confidently answer questions from students, other staff and parents.
Watch this video:
Marking
After students have taken their exams, scripts are sent to exam boards for marking.
Typically, exam scripts are split up into individual questions. An individual examiner marks different students’ responses to the same question, using a mark scheme that they have been trained on.
Working to a mark scheme helps to maintain consistency. Similarly, the quality assurance systems that exam boards have in place also maintain consistency by checking examiners’ work as they work through their allocated scripts.
Another important feature to ensure consistency is that exam scripts are marked completely anonymously; the marker doesn’t know who the student is, or what school or college they’re from.
Setting grade boundaries
For each subject and in each qualification the standard of work at each grade boundary needs to be comparable to the previous year, so that it is no harder or easier to get any particular grade from one year to the next.
To achieve this, evidence is used by exam boards to set the grade boundaries. This involves analysing data about the students taking the qualification and comparing it to those that have taken it previously. This data is used to identify potential grade boundaries which reflect whether students found the exam slightly harder or easier than the previous year.
Senior examiners then scrutinise samples of work from students who have achieved marks on and around these potential grade boundaries. This is compared with work of students from the previous year who were on the same grade boundaries.
Those scripts are studied to determine if the standard of work at the potential grade boundary is appropriate. Senior examiners use the evidence from their scrutiny in combination with the data, to recommend final grade boundaries that ensure the standard of work needed to achieve that grade is comparable year on year.
Grade boundaries often vary year on year, to reflect fairly any changes in how difficult the paper is. That way the standard of work needed to get any particular grade remains comparable to the year before. Standards are maintained over time, but the proportion of students awarded each grade is not fixed and does vary.
Determining individual grades
Once grade boundaries are finalised by the exam board, grades are then allocated to students based on the mark they got. The grades are sent to schools and colleges for them to share with students on results day.
So from exam hall to results day, every year, this is how the standard and value of A levels and GCSEs is maintained over time, and why students can be confident in the results they receive.