Supporting you with Cambridge Nationals moderated units – key dates and deadlines
27 March 2023
We understand that assessing your students’ coursework, submitting marks and preparing for moderation is time-consuming for teachers and exams officers.
However, it is very important that you meet the deadlines for submitting marks and student work. There is a significant risk that your students will not receive their results on results day if these deadlines are missed. This may also prompt an investigation.
We are here to support you. Please let us know if you are worried about missing the mark submission deadline or will not be able to submit your students’ work on time. This will reduce the risk of us having to contact your Head of Centre to resolve any queries in the summer holidays.
Here’s some key information to help you plan and manage your submission of marks and students’ work to the required deadlines:
When is the mark submission deadline?
You don’t need to wait until this deadline, as this is the last date when all marks must be received.
You can submit your marks at any time from now!
You will normally receive a sample request within one to two days of submitting your marks. The earliest you’ll receive a request is 3 May 2023.
When does candidate work need to be submitted?
Your exams officer will receive a sample request via email within one to two days of submitting your marks. You then have 3 working days to send the work to the OCR moderator.
What happens if you can’t meet a deadline?
We understand the unexpected can happen. If you think that you’re not going to be able to submit by 15 May 2023, please get in touch with us as soon as possible so we can help and discuss this with you.
Support and guidance
We provide full guidance on administering moderated units for Cambridge Nationals on our website, but we've summarised some of the key points below.
Online training
To support teachers with the administration and assessment of moderated units and components, we have free online training courses available. These cover all aspects of marking and administration, with example work and assessor commentary. These courses can be found on Teach Cambridge under the ‘Training’ tab.
For the new Cambridge Nationals qualifications, you must complete the ‘Essentials for the NEA’ training before you start to assess your students’ work. It will take around 30-45 minutes to complete and is designed to help you support and guide your students in line with our requirements.
Completing forms for moderated units
You can download the Cambridge Nationals forms required to mark and administer student work from our ‘forms finder’ and Teach Cambridge.
Check your submission method
We recommend submitting your samples digitally – uploading work is a perfect way to avoid any possible disruption in the postal service, and it allows you to keep your students’ original work safe. There are three ways to submit your work. We'd encourage you to use our new digital submission service Submit for Assessment – designed to improve your experience when uploading and submitting candidate work.
You can also submit candidate work for moderation via upload to OCR using the OCR Repository or via post.
Before you submit your marks, please check you’re happy with the submission method (and therefore entry option) you’ve selected. If you need to change the entry option from the OCR Repository to postal moderation or vice versa, please do it before you submit your marks so you don't get two separate sample requests. There's no charge for changing your method of moderation.
If you want to use Submit for Assessment, you don't need to change your entries – it doesn't matter whether you've made entries for postal moderation or the OCR Repository, you can use Submit for Assessment to submit your samples of work.
For further guidance, see our website.
Submitting marks
You can submit marks to us anytime from now.
There are two methods you can use:
Submitting candidate work successfully
You can view guidance on how to submit work on the internal assessment page of our website.
- Make sure all of your work is clearly labelled and all electronic links work
- Make sure you've completed any required forms and cover sheets
- If posting the sample of work to the moderator, make sure the moderator address label we sent you matches the sample request email – if the addresses don't match, contact us at support@ocr.org.uk.
Don't ignore multiple emails for the same specification – you may receive a request for an additional sample!
Checklist
- Submission deadlines – put the dates in your calendar now!
- Work backwards putting in milestones required to hit the deadlines – here is a suggested timeline. Remember, you can submit marks earlier than the deadline if you’re ready
- 4–5 weeks before deadline – deadline for final submission of work from your students
- 3–4 weeks before – hold an internal standardisation meeting to check marking accuracy and rank order of your cohort
- 3 weeks before – share marks with students, allowing 2 weeks for reviews – this timescale will depend on your centre’s policy
- 5 days before – check the candidate work is ready for submission
- 5 days before – check the required documentation is prepared (centre and candidate authentication, cover sheets, record forms, etc)
- 5 days before – final internal standardisation meeting to agree marks to be submitted
- 2 days before – aim to have everything ready and, if ready, submit
- Marks submission day – submit marks via Interchange or via EDI – your exams officer may help you with this
- Mark submission + 1 day – sample request emailed to your exams officer
- Sample request received – check all submission materials to be sent in and take copies to be retained in the centre
- Sample request + 3 working days – send all requested candidates’ work to OCR
For more information about submitting marks and work, take a look at the Cambridge Nationals internal assessment pages on our website.
If you have any queries about this update, please call our Customer Support Centre on 01223 553998 or email support@ocr.org.uk.