How grades are worked out

Boundaries, working-at, predictions, targets and the status colours.

Every grade in the app comes from the exam board’s published grade boundaries. There is no guesswork and no model in the middle.

A mock grade

When a student’s marks are in, the app adds them up and compares the total with the boundaries for that paper in that series. The boards publish these as “notional component boundaries” on results day. For example, if 4 starts at 32 marks and 5 at 38 on a paper, a student with 35 gets a 4.

Because each paper is graded against its own series, a mock on the June 2024 paper and one on the November 2024 paper are both fair, even though the boundaries differ.

The four grades you will see

Grade	What it means	Where it comes from
Mock grade	The grade on one paper	That paper’s boundaries for its series
Working-at	The grade the student is working at across the course so far	Marks on the work that counts, scaled up to the whole qualification and compared with the subject’s overall boundaries (with any buffer applied)
Predicted	The teacher’s professional judgement of the final grade	Entered by the teacher on the marksheet or class page
Target	The minimum grade the school expects	Set or uploaded by the school, and can be locked

Status against target

Wherever a grade sits beside a target, it carries one of four colours, the convention schools already use:

Above at least one grade above target
On target on target
1 below one grade below target
2+ below two or more grades below

The colours are the same in light and dark mode, and every status is also written in words, so nobody has to rely on colour alone.

The target grid: marks to the next grade

For each student the app shows how many more marks each higher grade would have taken, for example “2 to a 5 · 7 to a 6 · 12 to a 7”. Teachers use it in conversations with students, and it appears on the student page, the results table and the student’s report.

Close to the next grade lists, on This week and the results page, are students within 3 marks of the next boundary.

The buffer

Many departments make boundaries slightly harder than last summer’s, so that students are not told they are safe when they are borderline. The buffer does this for working-at grades only: a 3% buffer raises every subject boundary by 3% of the maximum mark. Mock grades are never buffered; they are what the board would have given on that paper. A head of department sets the buffer, along with which year’s boundaries to use; see Grading settings and targets.