Managing Cambridge Nationals results: June 2019

It seems like no time at all since I published my last blog posts about making entries and general admin information for Cambridge Nationals, and now we’re approaching the summer results release! 

In this blog, you’ll see hints and tips for managing results, including what to look out for if you find you have any missing or incomplete results. 

How Cambridge Nationals qualifications work 

Cambridge Nationals are unitised qualifications. This means the qualifications can be taken in chunks, or units, throughout the course. At the end of the course, you make a free certification entry (‘cash-in’) to pull together all of the unit results into an overall subject grade. 

Units and qualifications are graded as follows: 

• Pass, Merit, Distinction, Distinction* at Level 2 
• Pass, Merit, Distinction at Level 1 

The difficulty of unitised qualification exam papers may vary from year to year. In order to ensure fairness and consistency across years and within subjects, the raw examination marks are converted into a common scale. This scale is known as the uniform mark scale/score (UMS). It gives a fixed scale with common boundaries that are unchanged year on year and is used to make the marks compatible and comparable. The UMS grade boundaries are available on our grade boundaries page. To find out more about how unitised grades are calculated you can visit the results pages of our website and you can use our online tool to convert raw scores to UMS. 

How and when we issue results 

As for GCSEs, Cambridge Nationals results are embargoed until the official result release date. The results are then made available automatically at 12.01am on restricted results release day (21 August), and students can then be given their results from 6am the following day (22 August). An additional resource you might also find helpful is the JCQ release of results document, as this lets you know who’s allowed access to what and when. 

EDI results files 

You will receive two EDI result files on restricted results day. One results file will contain unit marks and grades, and the other is a certification file which contains qualification marks and grades (any reformed GCSE results will also be in this file). 

We’ll be providing updated EDI results files weekly until the end of the post-results period via Interchange. To access the files, log in to Interchange, hover over ‘Results’ and click on ‘EDI Results’ – if you do choose to use these files, they will overwrite any manual changes you’ve made to results. 

Interchange results reports 

You can also find a number of separate results reports on Interchange available for you to download from the restricted results release date – these are the same as the results reports available for GCSEs. Have a look at the results reports page of our website for more information and to find examples of these reports. 

Missing or incomplete results 

If you have any missing results, the first thing to check is whether you still need to make a certification entry. You can make a late certification request via Interchange up to the closing date for this service (19 September). 

You may also need to check your candidates have been entered for the correct combination of units. You can find more details on the entries rules page of our website. 

If a candidate grade is showing as ‘Q’, a result is pending or is currently unavailable. In each instance we should have contacted your centre in advance to explain why the result is pending. If you have not received any communication from us, please speak with your Head of Centre who will have more information about the issue. 

If you encounter any of these issues, or have any further questions, please get in touch with our Customer Support Centre where our advisors will be more than happy to help.

About the author

Paul Jones - Senior Customer Support Manager

Paul is the Senior Customer Support Manager. The Customer Support Team provides support, training and guidance for centres administering OCR qualifications. Before joining the Customer Support Team Paul worked in the Operational Hub and as a Qualifications Manager. His experience in these roles has given Paul a diverse range of knowledge that helps to assist and support our customers.