Academic grading in the United Kingdom

This is an article about the grading used below degree level in most of the United Kingdom. The entire United Kingdom does not use the same grading scheme (grades are referred to as marks in the UK). For degree level, see British undergraduate degree classification.

England, Wales and Northern Ireland use a unified system for grading secondary school qualifications. Generally, the English and Welsh secondary school grading follows in line with the GCSE grades.

In the compulsory state education system up to the age of 14, assessment is usually carried out at periodic intervals against National Curriculum levels. This is especially the case at the end of each Key Stage, at the ages of 7, 11 and 14, where students are statutorily assessed against these levels. The levels are applied to each of the compulsory subjects, and range from Level 1 to Level 8, with an additional band for 'Exceptional Performance'. The Department for Education states that students should be expected to reach a standard level at the end of each Key Stage. These are stated as being Level 2 at age seven, Level 4 at age eleven, and then Level 5 at age twelve, and level 6c level 8a at age fourteen. Children are expected to make two sub levels of progress per year, e.g.: average=4c in year 6, whilst average in year 7=4b, year 8=5c and finally, year 9=5a

A General Certificate of Secondary Education is, as of September 2015, graded on a 1 - 9 scale, with a 9 being the highest possible achievement and 1 being the lowest.

A 9 is considered exceptional and, statistically, only awarded to the top 3% of the population.

However, "9-1" exams are to be taken from 2017 for English Literature, English Language and Mathematics and from 2018 for all other subjects. Those who will be taking exams in subjects other than English and Maths in 2017 will be graded A*-G, with A* being the highest grade obtainable.

GCSEs are commonly studied from the age of 13/14 until the age of 16, and are the last portion of mandatory qualifications.

The General Certificate of Education (GCE) Advanced Level ('A'-level), is graded on a scale of A-E, (sometimes called a 5 tier grading skale or 5 tiered grading system), and previously an intermediate N (Nearly passed) which was awarded for papers missing grade E by a very small margin (not used since 2008). The marks in each paper are converted to a “Unified Mark Scheme” (UMS) according to the difficulty and weighting of the paper, and the individual UMS for each paper is added to give an overall score (out of 600 for a full 'A'-Level). It is important to note that UMS marks for a paper are not the raw marks. The UMS marks for each grade, and maximum obtainable, are as follows:

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