Official Statistics

Revisions made to the statistical release

Updated 17 April 2018

Applies to England, Northern Ireland and Wales

1. Context

Ofqual published the statistical release, ‘Reviews of marking and moderation for GCSE, AS and A Level: summer 2017 exam series’, on 14 December 2017. Subsequently, a part of data was revised by one of the awarding bodies – WJEC. The revised data has been incorporated and the updated statistical release has been published.

2. Revisions made

The report has been updated following receipt of revised data from WJEC which includes the following corrections.

  1. WJEC discovered an error in their summer 2017 data; the pre-review raw unit marks supplied to Ofqual included special consideration adjustments but the post-review raw unit marks did not. This error affected statistics published on raw unit mark changes following review. WJEC have corrected this so that both the pre- and post-review raw unit marks include special consideration adjustments.
  2. WJEC have changed the way they report reviews of moderation to Ofqual and now report in line with the other exam boards. Previously, if a review of moderation resulted in no change in outcome, WJEC provided us with data for the sample of students whose work was initially moderated (and therefore re-moderated) whilst the other exam boards provided us with data for all the students in the centre who took the unit. WJEC have corrected their summer 2017 reviews of moderation data to include data for all students in the centre who took the unit irrespective of the outcome. This difference in reporting does not affect the number of reviews of moderation reported across years as these reviews are counted at centre level and not student level. However, it does affect the number of grades challenged – these figures will be lower for WJEC than the other exam boards for the years 2014 to 2016.

We have also received revised unit entry data from OCR, Pearson and WJEC and Table 1 in each of the data tables accompanying this release have been updated to reflect this. The data updates have led to very small changes in the statistics published.