2025 A Level Results Day and Sept Uni Starters - All Welcome

[SlightlyJaded]

I couldn't see board specifically dedicated to results day for our DC who have sat A levels this spring. And I know some of us STILL have questions about Uni starters.

DS has Liverpool as his first choice and Notts Trent as his insurance - both to study History. Anyone who recognises me from previous boards might remember the hell we went through with DD a couple of years ago, so DS has applied quite a lot of caution to his choices - perhaps too much, perhaps not enough. Neither of us have any idea what to expect with his results. He has genuinely fluctuated between a D and an A in some of his mocks....

I still haven't done anything about accommodation which is one of the reasons I am starting this thread.

But mostly, it's for nail biting, relief, tears, support, advice and all the other things needed to get us through the next few weeks.

Welcome :)

There has been an issue with certain documentation my son needed to upload on the UCAS hub for his course and it still says waiting for confirmation. His first choice uni has said he has met the criteria but no actual confirmation showing as yet. :( I don’t think he will find out today.

Both my DDs went to - and absolutely loved - Sheffield University. And have done pretty well since then! Believe me, there will be plenty of other students there who achieved highly in their A levels.

Must agree with other posters that Sheffield Hallam is also fab.

Nothing wrong with it! Only you won't get many people with A*AA there compared to Sheffield Uni.

My DD has had a bit of a shock, expecting A in her main subject but got a D. In the other 2 she’s done better than anticipated. She’s so upset with the D she wants to resit. However she’s got her firm place (but was hoping to trade up via Clearing but now that hasn’t been possible).

Is it a good idea to resit?
she is confident of A or A* if she resits and wants to aim for a top uni.
I’m not sure whether I should be proud or despair!!
she’s got an RG uni in the bag!

DS got the grades for his first choice (phew!), but very unexpectedly dropped 2 grades for his strongest subject (a humanities) from a predicted A* to a B.

His teachers had access to the marks from each paper he sat, and could see that he had an A* and A for the first 2 papers then a C for the final paper, which was the one he found easiest. He's never had a C for any mock paper in this subject, and we suspect that either they've lost part of his paper (he does exams on a laptop and prints off the paper at the end) or some of the essay marks have been omitted or entered in error, so have requested a review of marking.

Reading through this thread is sounds like there are a few similar stories of unexpectedly low grades - for those affected, it is definitely worth checking marks of individual papers to see if one paper stands out as an anomaly.

DD's drama teacher has recommended seeing if it's worth a re-mark as she just missed an A, so he's going to get her papers and see if he thinks they're are any marks that weren't picked up. She's not under time pressure, so it's worth doing, I think.

Remark was a week for us last year.

Priority mark can sometimes come back before the weekend if it was processed today!
But a few days is pretty usual. Def get requests in sharpish.

It would be pretty obvious if an answer was missing from the script.

Was she going to study the subject she got a D in at Uni? If so, I think yes maybe it would be a good idea for her to resit it. She could get advice from her school/college about possibly getting a review of the paper - it would be good to know what went so wrong in the exams for that subject.

Especially if she was never that keen on going to the uni she has an offer from. There would be advantages to taking a year out - retaking that exam, choosing a different uni, even maybe thinking long and hard about whether that is the best subject for her considering she did better in the other subjects.

Time out to reassess everything could be beneficial, uni will still be there next year.

For any of you reading this that have children that have really not done well - he is my story for today.
My Ds took maths, chem and bio and Epq.

He got a C in EPQ and an E in maths.
he is absolutely devastated and we have no idea what went wrong as his predicated grades were good and he performed well in class. His mocks were on target.

He cannot go to uni this year now and we are sat working out a plan. Trying not show him how sad I feel for him as he feels as though he has let everyone down. I have told him I could not be more proud and I am ☺️

Yes it sounds like it is worth it in this case.

If the grade gets changed, the fee gets refunded.

unless this has already gone in you should request sight of the scripts first. they come back within an hour or so.

You can then see whether the marks add ups and the teachers can have a look to see whether they think there have been significant errors that would make a review worthwhile.

I'm sorry that is really upsetting.

You've said he got an E in maths but do you mind saying what he got in Chemistry and Biology? Also, what does he want to study at uni?

They should be able to look at the paper first before a mark review. But , yes, the teachers will have mark by mark breakdowns. Last year , one of our examiners simply didn't mark a whole response for a student. The missing mark wasn't picked up by the board ( you'd think that would be flagged for a check) : it's totally left to the teachers!

You would hope so, but who knows - if the last essay was missing they may just have assumed he didn't finish the paper. The other possibility is an error in entering grades for individual questions to calculate the total.

Apart from the B, his other grades are 3 A-stars (all essay-based humanities subjects), so a C grade on a paper that he definitely finished and found very straightforward suggests something odd has happened (and his teachers agree).

DCs scripts were back within 30 minutes this morning

Is it worth querying it? One of my school mates, predicted AAA, got AAE and no-one (including her) could understand how the E happened. It was queried and it turned out that one whole paper had been lost/forgotten/ignored somehow and once the marks for that were included she did indeed get an A.

If she's done much better in the other subjects and thought the exams went well, maybe something similar happened?

Same story here. As far as we can see, there’s no cheap way of retaking them, either, which I find baffling tbh. Not sure what the next step is yet but I’m sure it will sort itself out somehow.

At a loss as to all these stories of drops of multiple grades (a-d etc) are securing their first place still???

In my day a drop of one grade by one letter meant the difference between firm and insurance! And certainly between RG and non RG!

In DS's case, he did 4 A levels, so still met his first-choice offer with 3 of his subjects despite dropping 2 grades from predicted in his fourth subject.

Exactly the same situation here - I posted earlier about meeting the grades but offer not confirmed. Turns out she hadn’t uploaded a certificate as requested. She’s uploaded that on to the uni portal now, does she also need to upload it to UCAS?

She did ring them again uni who said if she uploaded it today then a decision would be made, but it was a real struggle trying to find where to upload it to!

Ohhhhh! That makes sense.

Need some advice. What to consider when choosing between Loughborough and Uni of York for Econ?

YP predicted AAA but got BBB (one of those were a big surprise as always working at A/A comfortably).

Very much so!