Examiner feedback - it's important!

AQA are the largest awarding body for GCSE Geography, with 66% of students across the UK sitting this examination in comparison to the other exam boards. 196,235 sat the AQA specification in 2024 – the next largest exam board was Edexcel with 47,912 entries (spilt between the A and B specs).

Grade boundaries have increased across all boards from 2023 - this has caused much discussion over social media over the last 24 hours. However, the proportion of students achieving each numerical grade is roughly in line with last year’s figures. The reason for the increase in grade boundaries is because overall students were scoring higher marks than last year, so grade boundaries have been adjusted accordingly. Which makes sense as back in May/June many of us were commenting on social media about how students had been pleased with the papers.

Grade boundaries for AQA...

The proportions of students reaching 4+ and 7+ are in line with previous years...

Lessons learned from the examiner reports

When I was a full time teacher and head of department I am not sure I fully appreciated the importance of the examiner feedback reports that are published on results day - with the never-ending list of things to do, sitting down and reading the reports in detail just didn't happen. The problem is that the reports tend to be very detailed and often a bit unwieldy, meaning that many teachers who have good intentions, never actually find the time to read them properly.

However, the examiner reports are a really useful tool to help inform your teaching, and in particular where to focus your efforts on. And with that in mind we will be publishing summaries of the reports for the 3 papers next week. I am hoping that by highlighting key comments and breaking them down into manageable chunks, they will become much more accessible for all.

This year the examiner reports are bigger than ever. However, there is a good reason for this as they also include example answers with commentary to highlight features of successful answers, as well as those which missed several marks. This means that it is even more important to take advantage of these documents and make them part of your department CPD.