Assessment

Simple mark schemes

Informed by research evidence, our mark schemes have been designed to ensure high reliability, making it as easy as possible for you to mark your students’ assessments consistently with other teachers.

We understand that you want marking to be as quick and straightforward as possible – but you also want to know that you are marking correctly, in line with the intended standard and with other teachers.

Our mark schemes are carefully designed based on best practice and research evidence, to ensure they are applied as consistently as possible for high reliability.

They are clear and ensure you know what to credit (and what not to) and allow you to appropriately reward unexpected responses.

Where relevant, they include alternative solutions and exemplar answers to help you understand the standard.

Easy data entry

Our partner, Smartgrade, provides easy-to-use markbooks to enter your students’ data.

The online markbooks are quick and easy to use. They’re automatically populated with your pupil and class data from your MIS, so you can just open the platform and start entering your marks.

The interface is clear and simple for any  teaching or support staff member to use. You can move around the table just like a spreadsheet, and Smartgrade automatically saves every piece of data you enter – you can’t forget to save and you won’t lose data if your laptop crashes!

You can choose to provide whole-paper marks only to get summative reporting, or quickly enter question-level marks to access full formative analysis for your students.

Instant formative analysis

As soon as you submit your markbooks, you’ll be able to access detailed analysis of your students’ strengths and gaps.

You will immediately see which knowledge or skills individual students or whole classes need help with.

Analysis is broken down by different areas of content, skills and applications, depending on what is appropriate for the subject. You can easily see which areas of the Specification align to students’ strengths and gaps. Full question-level analysis is also available.

Analysis available through Smartgrade includes average marks per question and content/skill area, along with visual heatmapping to allow you to easily see where individual students or your whole class has strengths or gaps.

Cohort-benchmarked reporting

Once our data-entry window closes, you’ll be able to access standardised grades and cohort percentile rankings.

You will see how your students are performing compared to a national cohort, with reporting to suit your needs.

A percentile ranking across the whole cohort that has taken the assessment nationally is provided. For end-of-year assessments, a ‘National Distribution Grade’ of 9-1 is provided, to allow you to easily understand how your pupils have performed relative to a national standard.

Analysis available through Smartgrade can be grouped by gender, PP and other characteristics, all automatically populated from your school’s MIS, along with visual heatmapping to allow you to easily see how your students are performing compared to a national cohort.

Specification document

Our assessments are fully aligned with the United Curriculum but can also be used standalone. 

Our Specification Documents set out all the knowledge and skills in the curriculum, so you can see exactly what is covered by our assessments.

United Curriculum assessments will assess a sample of the content in the Specification Document for each subject. What is assessed may vary from year to year, just like in an exam.

We specifically set out what parts of the specification are covered in our mid-year assessments, so you can see if your curriculum is sufficiently aligned at the mid-year point to make the assessments meaningful.

What is Smartgrade?

Smartgrade is a platform that provides administration for assessments including data entry, analysis and standardisation.

We partner with them to provide an interface for you to access your assessments, enter your students’ marks, and view your analysis and reporting. The platform also enables us to provide standardised grades and rank orders across the whole cohort taking United Curriculum assessments.

Smartgrade will fully support you with the onboarding process, which is quick and easy. This will include setting up integration with your school’s MIS, ensuring that your pupil and class data automatically appears in Smartgrade to avoid unnecessary data entry.

You can find out more about Smartgrade at www.smartgrade.co.uk.