To help schools and colleges prepare for the results season, here’s an update on reviews of marking this year. 

Improving the service 

You’ll be pleased to know we’ve made it simpler for you to view and track your reviews of marking. Once you’ve requested your reviews, you’ll be able to see all the student details, not just a reference number. Also, the outcome email notifications you receive will include the student name and number in the email subject. 

All of the review outcomes will include previous and new marks (not just grades) for the overall qualification and each component or paper. 

Coupled with our new statements of marks, which are updated dynamically, this will make it easier than ever before to access up-to-date results information for your students. 

Additional quality checks 

Our primary concern is always to make sure students taking our exams get the results they deserve. We’ve therefore improved our approach to reviews of marking this year by updating the training we give to examiners who review student papers and by increasing our monitoring of how they do this. This year, we’ll be quality checking all ‘reviewers’ throughout the process, whether a student’s mark has changed or not. 

What does this mean for schools and colleges? 

We are committed to ensuring students get the right outcome from a review in a timely way, and no university or college places are put at risk. Since we’re introducing additional quality checks to the process this summer, this could mean our reviews take a day or two longer to complete. Our advice is to submit any priority reviews on behalf of students as soon as possible. 

What if there’s a university place at risk? 

You have a week to request a priority review of marking after A Level results day. The deadline for requesting our priority 2 service, covering AS and A Levels, as well as Cambridge Technicals, is 23 August. Please aim to get your requests in quickly so we can respond early and help get any information to universities as promptly as possible.

In the rare event we are unable to complete all the additional checks for the priority reviews by 31 August due to late requests, we will issue ‘provisional’ results of the review. We believe this is still in the best interests of the student. 

In all cases, students should keep the university informed so they can take this into account when making their decisions.

About the author

Alison Leather - Customer Support Manager (South East)

Alison is Customer Support Manager for the South East region. The Customer Support Team provides support, training and guidance for centres administering OCR qualifications.

Alison has worked in education since 1995, as an Exams Manager in a college, a Centre Support Officer with the National Assessment Agency (NAA) and an Exams Officer in a secondary school – so she knows how challenging and rewarding it can be working in the exams office. Alison joined OCR as Customer Support Manager in 2007.