Cambridge Technicals qualifications are unitised qualifications, which means they are designed to be taken in chunks, or units, throughout the course. 

These units are either assessed via an exam or coursework which is marked by teachers and then ‘moderated’ by an OCR moderator. When all the required units have been taken, we automatically issue an overall grade. 

Units are graded as Pass, Merit or Distinction. In addition, a Near-Pass grade is available for Level 3 examined units (Cambridge Technicals 2016 suite) and is reported as ‘R’. This allows a student to achieve an overall qualification without passing one or more of the externally assessed units. 

You can see the grade scales for Cambridge Technicals overall qualifications on the grade scales page. 

To be awarded a full qualification, a student must achieve the units required for the qualification with at least

• A Near-Pass grade for the externally assessed units at Level 3 (2016 suite only)
  
• An Achieved or Pass grade for the externally assessed units at Level 2 (2016 suite only)
• A Pass grade for all the centre-assessed units. 

We assign points to each unit, based on the grade achieved and the guided learning hours (GLH) of the unit. To calculate the overall grade, we add the points from the units together and award a qualification grade based on the grade point range (boundaries) for the qualification. 

If more units or guided learning hours than required for the qualification have been taken, we will only use the points from strongest optional units.

Full details of the points for each unit, the points range for the overall qualification and examples of how to calculate the overall grade can be found in Section 10 of the 2016 centre handbooks and Section 6 of the 2012 handbooks for each qualification.