High-quality assessments
Written by our experts in line with industry best practice, our assessments have high validity and a clear, straightforward design to ensure your students are able to show what they know and can do.
Most subjects have assessments available twice a year, at the mid-point and at the end of the year. New, unseen papers will be provided each year. Each paper is designed to last one hour or less, enabling it to be sat during normal lesson time.
Papers include a variety of questions intended to assess students’ knowledge and their ability to use their knowledge in the ways set out in the Specification. They will usually include multiple-choice or objective questions, short-answer questions, and extended response questions. Students may be asked to bring together knowledge from different sections of the specification to show their holistic understanding of the content.
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.