How can you use Active Results and Access to Scripts to understand your results?
10 August 2023
Andy Brunning, Lead Subject Advisor
Once your students have their results this summer, your focus will turn to analysing how your cohort this year has performed, as well as making decision about post-results services if necessary. Our free Active Results and Access to Scripts services are perfect to help you with these. In this blog, I summarise what’s available and how they can help.
Using Active Results to understand your students’ performance
Active Results is our free online results analysis service, available for all GCSEs, AS and A Levels and Cambridge Nationals. It features numerous different reports to make it easy for you to interpret your candidate, department and centre results. Reports also contain national performance data, enabling you to compare your own specific results with the national picture.
The reports available include:
- Specification reports: Provide a breakdown of your centre’s performance for each qualification as a whole. A comparison of performance across the last three series is also available.
- Unit/Component reports: Provide analysis of specific units or components and give you performance breakdowns at unit/component, module and question level.
- Candidate reports: Provide analysis on individual candidate performance. These are available at different levels, from whole specification performance, to unit/component performance, right down to individual question performance.
- Centre overview reports: Provide a results overview for all OCR specifications and units/components offered across a centre.
All of the reports available can be filtered and also viewed showing either the mark achieved or the percentage (of the maximum mark) achieved. All reports can be exported in a variety of formats for further analysis, or just to save them for future reference.
Active Results will make your analysis of exam performance straightforward, helping you easily pinpoint areas of strength and development for your future students. Our website has full details on accessing and using it.
Are you overseeing multiple centres at a Trust and wanting to view performance data across all your centres? Get in touch to find out how we can further support you.
Getting free instant Access to Scripts
After successful trials in 2022, this summer we’ve rolled out our free Access to Scripts service to all of our General Qualifications and Cambridge Nationals. It allows you to easily download your students’ exam scripts from results day up until 28 September.
In order to download a script, you’ll need written permission from each student after they have received their results. Currently, only exams officers can download scripts, with access through My Cambridge. The service allows you to search by candidate or qualification and download scripts individually or in bulk (in batches up to ten candidates). Downloads are free and instant.
Once downloaded, scripts can be used to provide you with additional exemplar work from your own candidates for department professional development, as well as giving you insight into how your students approached particular questions. If you’re considering submitting a review of marking for a particular candidate, we also encourage you to use Access to Scripts to view their paper first.
Check out our step-by-step guide to using Access to Scripts for exams officers.
Stay connected
If you have any questions about using Active Results or Access to Scripts, you can email us at support@ocr.org.uk, call us on 01223 553998 or tweet us @ocrexams. You can also sign up to subject updates to keep up-to-date with the latest news, updates and resources.
About the author
Andy joined OCR in September 2017 as the subject advisor for A Level Chemistry. He has a Chemistry BSc and a Secondary Science PGCE from the University of Bath. Before joining OCR, he worked as a chemistry teacher in Bournemouth and Cambridge. He also sidelines as a science communicator and has produced infographic projects for the Royal Society of Chemistry and the American Chemical Society.
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