How our support materials can help grade students this summer

This week we've published subject specific grading exemplars for every OCR A and AS Level, GCSE, FMSQ, Core Maths, EPQ, Cambridge National and Cambridge Technical specification, to help you determine your students' grades this summer.

Our grading exemplars provide real life examples of student responses from our most relevant exam papers with new commentaries by our examiners explaining the grading. Wherever possible, grading exemplars with real student responses and commentaries are also provided for NEA.

Designed to help you make high level holistic decisions about grading a whole piece of work or a range of evidence, the exemplars are provided for multiple grade points for each specification. Exemplars are provided for additional grade points for GCSE English Language and Maths. We've also provided advice in our grading exemplars on reaching a grading decision for students with an uneven grade profile. Each grading exemplar document also incorporates and makes real the abstract grade descriptors for the relevant grade. The grading exemplars follow on from other support materials we've already published designed to help you mark individual questions.

The full package of support materials

Our publication of 150 grading exemplars on 19 April completes a package of support materials for you on our secure Grade submission system. This includes:

Additional assessment materials - over 4000 sets of questions in editable formats based on past papers, plus mark schemes and mapping grids. Mapping grids, which are linked to assessment objectives, highlight the skills and content covered within a question, help you to identify gaps in the range of evidence used and find information that is most relevant to you. We've provided extensive general and subject specific guidance, alongside the questions. Please see the note below about student access to the additional assessment materials.

Marking exemplars - over 450 exemplars designed to support you to apply mark schemes when you're looking at your students' responses to questions. 

Performance data - question level data for use with our additional assessment materials. You can use the data to help you create bespoke tests or to determine whether a student's answer is performing above or below average. We've provided guidance to support your use of this data. 

Our additional assessment materials are optional and can be used flexibly to help you fill gaps in the evidence you have. Our wider support materials, such as the grading exemplars, can also help you to make grading decisions about other pieces of evidence you have.

For students

On 19 April, we gave students access to the additional assessment materials (sets of questions) on this public website. The questions are available without mark schemes and with slimmed down mapping grids. We've created a finder which helps students to search by qualification and access a downloadable zip file of questions. Students can also access generic grade descriptors under the 'assessment' tab of each qualification on our public website.

Further support

To help you to apply what we've provided and answer your questions about determining grades for your students, we're publishing a Summer 21 grading roundtable video to support you. If you have further questions to ask our subject advisors, we're also running Q&A subject webinars from 27 April. If you would like more details, please sign up for our weekly updates here.