We know how important this time of year is for everyone – whether you’re a student, parent, teacher, or exams officer.  

Every single result is important to us and we are committed to providing accurate results on time. We provide a variety of tools and information to support you on and around results day and we’ve updated our website to make them easier to find. 

So, if you’re receiving your exam results this year, you can find all the key information you’ll need, including UMS and raw mark grade boundaries, in the learners and parents section. 

For teachers and exams officers, our website provides all the useful details about results release that you might need.  Full details are available in the blog post written by our Customer Support Team Manager, Helen O’Leary.

What are ‘estimated’ grades?

In 2014, OCR issued GCSE results to over half a million students and issued A Level results to nearly 400,000 students. There is a very small percentage of cases every year when the result of one paper is not available. All exam boards follow the Joint Council for Qualification (JCQ) guidance which sets out how to manage this situation: 

“If a student has missed part of the assessment due to illness or another legitimate reason, or on the rare occasion that a script goes missing, then a grade for that paper may be calculated based on performance in other papers sat for that qualification.  This is known as a Z-score and is applied the same way by all JCQ awarding organisations offering GCSEs and A levels. The assumption is that the student will perform as well – no better, no worse – on the paper with the missing mark compared to their performance on the other papers when compared to the national cohort. Other criteria are used to ensure robustness and fairness, for example in GCSEs at least 50% of the qualification must have been taken for a Z-score to be processed.” 

The guidance was developed to support candidates in exceptional circumstances. More detailed information on how a Z-score is calculated can be found here; http://www.jcq.org.uk/exams-office/access-arrangements-and-special-consideration/other-documents/estimating-the-mark-when-a-candidate-is-absent.