How exams work

GCSEs in England are graded 9 to 1, where 9 is the highest. A 4 is a “standard pass” and a 5 a “strong pass”. Combined Science is worth two GCSEs, so it gets a double grade from 9-9 down to 1-1.

GCSEs in Wales (WJEC) use letters, A* to G. GCSEs in Northern Ireland (CCEA) use nine letter grades, A* to G, with an extra C* between B and C.

A Levels are graded A* to E, and AS Levels A to E.

Some GCSEs, such as Maths, the sciences and languages, have two tiers. You sit one or the other, and your school decides which.

In England, Foundation tier papers award grades 1 to 5. Higher tier papers award grades 4 to 9, and an “allowed” grade 3 if you just miss a 4. Grade boundaries are set separately for each tier, so a mark on a Foundation paper can't be compared with the same mark on a Higher paper.

A grade boundary is the minimum total mark needed for each grade. Boards set them after each exam series is marked, looking at how hard the papers turned out to be, so they change every year. A tougher paper usually means lower boundaries.

That's why old boundaries are useful for practice but aren't a prediction: use them to turn a past paper score into a rough grade. Our grade boundary pages show the boundaries for the whole qualification, which means your marks added up across every paper.

Most boards publish boundaries in raw marks, the marks you actually scored. CCEA, and older modular qualifications, use uniform marks: each paper's raw mark is converted to a uniform mark with a table the board publishes for every series, and the uniform marks are added up. Uniform mark boundaries are fixed (for example 80% for an A), so the conversion is the part that changes each year.

Boundaries in uniform marks are labelled “Uniform marks” on this site and are never mixed with raw marks.

In England, the AS is a separate, smaller qualification. Your AS result doesn't count towards the A Level, which is assessed by exams at the end of the course.

In Wales (WJEC) and Northern Ireland (CCEA), the AS is the first part of the A Level and counts for 40% of the final grade.

Most exams are sat in the summer series in May and June. There's a November series for GCSE English Language and Maths resits, and some boards run January or March series too. The exam timetable lists every exam.

Every qualification has a specification code, such as AQA 8461 for GCSE Biology or OCR H556 for A Level Physics A. It's printed on the front of past papers and on your exam entry. Searching for the code is the quickest way to find the right papers and boundaries, especially when a board offers more than one route in the same subject.