Please help me understand GCSE 'marks', 'points' etc!

[longingforsomesleep]

I thought it was just our school that produced exam results in an unintelligible format, but having glimpsed papers students were waving about on the news this morning, it looks like it might be a standard format.

I keep reading about students who were only 1 point off the next grade but can't work this out for my son! If I look at grade boundaries on the AQA website for example, but they bear little relation to the marks on my son's exam results paper.

Alongside the column with overall grades there is a column called "mark equivalent". Could someone explain to me what this is and what the marks are out of? Next to that there is a column headed 'points'. What does that mean? And again, out of what?

Any help in deciphering this would be very welcome!!

UMS = uniform mark scheme.
Why they can't do good old fashioned percentages I don't know.

There's a detailed explanation here at The Student Room.

Clear as mud IMO

Indeed! So does anyone know what the "points" in the final column represent?

If you write here, the exam board and exactly what is written for each subject then we could work this out by going onto the board website and looking at the grade boundaries.

The marks under the final "points" column all follow the same pattern regardless of exam board. For every A* grade it says 58 points; for every A grade it says 46 points; and for every B grade it says 46 points. And that's across a mixture of AQA, EDEXL and OCR boards.

So, for example (I'll pick the best one!) for Eng Lit it reads:

Grade column - A then "Mark Equiv" column 183 (which I now know from advice above is out of 200 and 180 is the boundary for A) and then in "points" column 58. Its the points column I don't understand now.

The points is the equivalent points that allows them to work out progress over time so each grade including national curriculum SATs levels (remember the 4b, 5a of KS2 SAts) will have an equivalent point score

BoundandRebound - I've never heard of that before. Is there a scale for the marks?

Yes there is a scale- a grade c is worth 40 points and any grade above of below is worth 6 points more or less- so a b is 46 points.
The points at GCSE at more useful for schools and are what schools are judged against e.g best 8 p

I'm confused. On all my son's results paper, the grades correspond with the the points, I E; points 5 and under grade is 5. However, on one subject, he has 0 for points which doesn't correspond with his Grade or Mark Equivalent. So, what is this end column, points?