On Tuesday we held our annual Summer Symposium. Given the circumstances this summer, it was a webinar, meaning we could speak to many more people than usual. In relation to GCSEs, AS and A levels in England, we focused on …
Making sure that qualifications are fair requires careful design, analysis and evaluation of all aspects of qualification delivery. Fairness sits at the heart of our work and is something we are thinking about all the time.
This latest blog in our series on test anxiety offer strategies which teachers might find useful to help reduce their students’ experiences of exam anxiety.
This blog discusses how school staff can help students through exam time, looking at whole-school approaches and supporting individual needs.
While students are getting ready to take their exams this summer, exam boards are also busy, completing their examiner recruitment and finalising their arrangements for the series. This is no mean feat. Last summer alone, 63,000 examiners were needed to …
Test anxiety blog series: 2 Authors: Tamsin McCaldin, Kerry-ann Brown and Dr Jo Greenwood With recent changes to exams in England, there has been increased media interest into exam stress and what that might mean for students working towards exams. …
Around England, a sample of schools are about to take the third annual National Reference Test (NRT). This test provides a valuable and unique source of evidence about the performance of year 11 students in English language and maths. From …
Last year we committed to do further work to evaluate the new GCSEs in French, German and Spanish, and to consider whether there was a case for making an adjustment to the grading. There are several strands to this work …
At Ofqual, and regardless of the weather, our minds are always on the summer. We’re either thinking about the summer exam series just gone or the one to come. Sometimes we’re thinking about the series after that. We’re not alone. …
Some of you will remember the announcement we made in August 2018, that we were allowing exam boards to award an exceptional grade 3-3 on the higher tier of GCSE combined science, along with a full-width safety net grade 4-3. …