Five tips for teachers on getting the most from OCR on results day

Results day is one of the most important days in the academic year with both teachers and students anxiously waiting to find out if their hard work has paid off.

It’s often a day of mixed emotions, a day of celebrating and commiserating and saying goodbye to students as they move on.

Then it’s on to final planning for the next group of students. But how do you make sure that you use your students’ results to best inform your next year’s teaching?

Or help those students who didn’t do quite as well as expected? Or really understand what the results mean for you and your students?

This blog explores 5 ways in which we have improved our support to you both on results day and as you start preparing your next group of students for their exams.

1. Feedback on exam performance

Our new style examiners’ reports help us to share our knowledge and insight from the summer series and help you to prepare students for their exams.

These reports are framed around questions from the exam paper and some will contain candidate work from the series.

All our examiners’ reports contain valuable insight and feedback from our Principal Examiners.

The reports will be available on Interchange from results day onwards.

2. Helping students understand their results

We provide lots of useful information on our results slips (the OCR statements of marks). As well as the overall mark and grade, these show the breakdown of marks for each paper – making it easier to see exactly how well a student has done.

We’ve also produced a handy visual guide to these results slips that tells you exactly what all of the information means – and will help you explain this to your students.

If you want to help your students to understand how their A Level and GCSE grades are calculated, take a look at the two new info sheets on this page.

3. Quick access to past papers

After every exam this summer, we uploaded the exam papers to Interchange within two to ten days and mark schemes will also be available here on results day.

Using past papers alongside the relevant examiners’ report can be a great revision tool for your students as well as helping to fine-tune your own teaching. One of our subject advisors explores this in more detail in his blog: How to use examiners reports as classroom resources.

4. Easier to plan your CPD for next year

All our qualifications are supported by a comprehensive range of face-to face and online training. The programme for 2019/2020 has been designed to help you get to know and get the most from our qualifications – so that you can deliver them effectively and with confidence. Our events are connected steps that enable you to progress from an introduction to a new or revised qualification through a deeper understanding of its assessment criteria to a mastery of the specification and the practical ways to deliver it in your classroom.

Events are now available to book via our new Professional Development page. Further courses will be added throughout the year. Our new booking system is simpler, making it easier for you to search and book onto a course.

5. Enhanced Active Results service

Available from results day, Active Results is our free results analysis service which helps you review exam performance.

You can use it to review reports on the performance of individual students, cohorts and whole schools, analyse results at question item level, and help identify trends across your centre.

In preparation for results day, and to support you with your results analysis, we’ve made the service more user friendly, with enhanced accessibility, speed and performance. See what we’ve improved and the benefits to you in our handy factsheet.

Active Results is available for all GCSEs, A Levels and Cambridge Nationals.

Ways to get in touch

And whatever kind of results day you have, don’t forget we offer ongoing support through our Customer Support Centre, our subject advisors and our range of resources.

You might also want to follow us on one of our Twitter subject specific accounts for up to date information or @ocrexams. You can also contact us by email.

We hope that you found this blog useful – and you have a successful results day and enjoy the rest of your summer.

About the author

Rebecca Wood - Subject Advisor

Before joining OCR, Rebecca taught in post 16 education for 17 years. She also worked as an examiner and moderator across a range of creative subjects. Rebecca has also run workshops for young people as far afield as Brazil and Russia. In her spare time she enjoys travelling, spending time with her two sons and walking her dog.