“Can I get a paper remarked?” is one of the most-asked questions on results day, and the honest answer is: sometimes it is worth it, often it is not, and almost nobody tells you how to tell the difference before you have spent the money.
So here is the difference.
If you are reading this on results morning and deciding what to do next, the wider set of options, in order of how useful they usually turn out to be, is here: your grade came back lower than your mock.
What a “remark” actually is
There is no service called a remark. What people mean is one of three things, and they are not the same.
- Clerical re-check (Service 1). Someone checks that every part of the script was marked, that the marks were added up correctly, and that the total was recorded correctly. No judgement about the marking itself. Completed within 10 calendar days.
- Review of marking (Service 2). A trained reviewer checks that the mark scheme was applied correctly. This is the one most people want. At AQA it costs £44.85 at GCSE and £51.95 at A-level per paper, and is completed within 20 calendar days.
- Priority review of marking. The same as Service 2 but fast-tracked for A-level and Level 3 students whose university place is at stake. At AQA it costs £61.70 per paper and is completed within 15 calendar days, but the deadline to request it is tight: seven days after results.
Fees are set independently by each exam board, so the figures differ between them: AQA, OCR and Pearson Edexcel each publish their own. Most boards do not charge, or refund the fee, if the grade changes.
The critical thing to understand about a review of marking is what it is not. The reviewer does not re-mark the paper from scratch and they do not award marks for a different, kinder reading. They only correct genuine errors: a section that was missed, a mark scheme point that was clearly met and not credited, or an academic judgement no reasonable examiner could have made. If the original mark was defensible, it stays.
What the numbers actually say
This is where the vague advice does real harm, because the real figures are public. Ofqual publishes them every December. For the summer 2025 series in England:
- 389,730 reviews were requested for GCSE and 101,100 for A-level.
- Of the 243,150 GCSE grades that were formally challenged, 58,725 changed, 24.2%.
- Of the 58,830 AS and A-level grades challenged, 14,150 changed, 24.1%.
Two things fall out of that, and you need both.
First, close to one in four challenged grades changes. That is not a trivial share. If you have a real reason to think a paper was mismarked, the process works often enough to be worth taking seriously.
Second, and less comfortable: three in four challenged grades do not change. A review is not a re-roll of the dice. The students whose grades move are overwhelmingly the ones who had a specific, legitimate reason to expect it, not the ones who simply hoped for a better number.
A review of marking rewards a good reason, not optimism. About a quarter of challenges succeed, and almost all of those had evidence behind them before they were submitted.
Can it go down?
Yes. The rules are explicit that a review can lower a mark as well as raise it, which is why written consent is required and why marks and grades can both fall. In practice, downgrades are rare: in summer 2025, fewer than 0.1% of challenged grades were reduced. But “rare” is not “never”, and it is the reason you should never fire off a review on a hunch. If the paper was marked correctly, you have gained three weeks of anxiety and risked the grade you already hold.
Why the request has to go through your school
This surprises a lot of families, so it is worth being precise. For students entered through a school or college, the exam board will only accept a review request from the centre. Parents cannot submit one. Students cannot submit one directly. The awarding bodies will not even discuss an internal candidate’s result with anyone other than the school.
That is not a loophole to work around. It is the system working as designed: the school holds the professional relationship with the exam board, obtains your written consent, and submits on your behalf. If you want a review, the conversation starts with your subject teacher or head of department, not with the exam board.
Which also means the smart move is to make that conversation an easy “yes”. A teacher deciding whether to back a review is weighing their time, the fee, and the small risk of a downgrade against a vague sense that a grade “felt low”. Walk in with evidence and the decision changes.
Read the script first
Before any review, the marked script itself can be recalled: a copy of the paper through the Access to Scripts service. The exam board provides this copy free, though your school’s exams team handles the request, and many schools add an administration fee, typically £15 per script, to cover their time. Reading it is the single most useful and cheapest step in the whole process, because it turns “this felt low” into “look at question 6, that is a valid method and it scored zero.”
This is the step almost everyone skips, and it is the step that separates the quarter of challenges that succeed from the three-quarters that don’t. A review of marking only corrects mark-scheme errors, so the only reviews worth submitting are the ones where you can already point to one. If the script does show a missed mark, it is again the exams team who requests the review from the exam board: the recall is the cheap first look, the review is the paid step, and both go through the school rather than the student.
The deadlines for 2026
- A-level results: Thursday 13 August 2026. GCSE results: Thursday 20 August 2026.
- Priority reviews (A-level, university place at stake): must be requested within seven days of A-level results.
- Standard reviews of marking and clerical re-checks: the request must reach the exam board by 24 September 2026 for the summer series.
If a university place depends on the outcome, tell the university a review is in progress. Many will hold the place open while they wait.
Where Marky fits, and where it doesn’t
Honesty first, because it matters here. Marky marks against a mark scheme, and it cannot mark a script without one. For a paper that has only just been sat, the official mark scheme is often not available soon enough to use. Boards do not publish the current series’ schemes straight away, and the timing of the centre copy varies by board and subject, so it may not reach a teacher while the review window is still open. So Marky is not a shortcut for chasing this summer’s remark: where the scheme arrives late, the window has often closed by the time it does.
The useful role for Marky is earlier, and it is the one that stops this week from happening in the first place.
A review only ever recovers marks that were mislaid in the marking. It can do nothing about the marks a student never got onto the page. The way to not be reading a disappointing result next August is to mark often enough during the year to find those gaps while there is still time to teach them. That use has no mark-scheme problem at all, because past-paper schemes are already public.
That is what Marky was built for: a class set marked against the official scheme in minutes, with a per-question breakdown of exactly where the marks went, run as often as you want to run one. It supports Maths, Biology, Chemistry and Physics. A department marking a full set of mocks every few weeks, rather than once a term, is one whose students are far less likely to be surprised on results day.
So if your grade felt wrong this week, the honest first step has nothing to do with us: talk to your school, get the script back, and read it against the mark scheme once the board releases it. Marky’s job is to make sure fewer students are in that position next year.