You were predicted a 7. You got a 5. Or you needed an A and you have a B and a university place hanging on it.
The first hour is not the time to make decisions, and it is also exactly when everybody around you starts offering them. So this is written for the second hour: what actually happened, and what is genuinely worth doing about it, roughly in order.
First, what did not happen
Some quick reassurance, because the theories that arrive in the first hour are almost all wrong.
You were not marked against the other people in the room. Your script was marked on its own, against a mark scheme, by someone who did not know what the boundaries would be. There is no curve and no quota. If you want the detail of how that works, we wrote it up here.
The boundaries were not set to fail you. They move to cancel out how hard the paper turned out to be. If they were higher this year, the paper was easier this year.
Your teachers did not get it wrong on purpose. A predicted grade is a prediction, made from mocks and classwork, and mocks are marked against borrowed boundaries from a different year’s paper. Some optimism is built into the system.
One grade is not a verdict on you. It is genuinely worth saying out loud, because on the day it does not feel that way, and in five years almost nobody will ask.
Get the actual information first
Almost every decision below depends on facts you do not currently have. Before doing anything else, ask your school for these. Most of it your exams officer can get quickly.
- Your raw mark, and the boundary you missed. “A 5” is not information. “Fifty-two, when the 6 boundary was fifty-five” is. Three marks off and twenty marks off are completely different situations with completely different answers.
- The breakdown across the papers and components. Often one paper went badly and the others were fine. That tells you what to do next in a way the overall grade cannot.
- Whether your school is querying anything already. Departments often spot a pattern across several students before individuals do.
If you are near a boundary, that changes what follows. If you are a long way off, the honest answer is that the marking is probably not the problem, and the energy is better spent on the next thing.
Option 1: a review of marking
This is the thing people call a remark, and it is worth knowing three facts about it before you get your hopes up.
You cannot request it yourself. It goes through your school, always. Exam boards do not deal with candidates directly.
Marks can go down. The reviewer applies the mark scheme properly, in both directions. Most reviews change nothing, some go up, and some come back lower. Your school will ask for your consent because of this.
It costs money and it has a deadline. Fees vary by board and level, and the deadline for the summer series falls in September. If a university place is at stake there is a faster priority route with a much tighter deadline, usually within a week of A-level results.
The realistic read: a review is worth it when you are within a few marks of a boundary, and much less so when you are not. We have written the full version, including what the outcome rates actually look like and when it is not worth the fee, in Can I get my paper remarked?
Before that, ask about a clerical re-check. It is cheaper and faster, and it checks that everything was marked and the total was added up correctly. It happens rarely, and when it does happen it is the easiest fix available.
Option 2: ask for your script back
You can request a copy of your marked script through your school. This is worth doing whether or not you go for a review, and it is the most underused option on this list.
Two things it gives you. First, it is the only way to make an informed decision about a review, because you can see whether marks look genuinely mislaid or whether the paper simply went badly. Second, it is the single most useful revision document you will ever have if you are resitting, because it shows you exactly which marks you did not get and where.
Ask about timing when you ask for it, because in some cases the script arrives after the review deadline has passed, which is worth planning around rather than discovering.
Option 3: the next route rather than this one
Sometimes the grade is right and the answer is not to contest it.
At A-level, if a university place is affected: ring the university before you do anything else, including before Clearing. Offers are held more often than students expect, particularly when you are close and the rest of the application is strong. If you have a review in progress, tell them, and many will hold the place while it runs.
Resitting: GCSE English and maths resits run in November and are the norm rather than a mark of failure. Other GCSE subjects and A-levels generally go to the next summer series. A resit with your marked script in hand and a specific list of where the marks went is a different exercise from the first attempt, and it usually goes considerably better.
A different route entirely: BTECs, apprenticeships, foundation years and access courses exist and are not consolation prizes. A lot of people arrive at the same place by them.
The dates that constrain everything
- A-level results: Thursday 13 August 2026. GCSE results: Thursday 20 August 2026.
- Priority reviews for A-level students with a university place at stake must be requested within seven days of results.
- Standard reviews and clerical re-checks for the summer series must reach the board by 24 September 2026.
Those deadlines are firm, and the requests go through your school, so leaving it until the last week means depending on the exams officer being available in the first fortnight of term, which is their busiest.
What this is worth thinking about in September
A hard thing to hear on results day and worth saying anyway.
A review of marking can only recover marks that were mislaid in the marking. It can do nothing about marks that never made it onto the page. And the honest picture from marked scripts is that most missing marks are the second kind: the question left blank, the method done on a calculator and never written down, the answer that stopped one line short.
We counted this across 155 GCSE maths scripts, and 67.9% of every lost mark came from a question that scored nothing at all. Those are not marking errors. They are gaps, and they were visible months earlier to anyone who looked at a practice paper question by question rather than at the total on the front.
Which is the only genuinely useful thing to take from a disappointing morning. Not that the system failed you, though sometimes it does. But that the version of this that does not happen again involves finding out where the marks are going while there is still time to teach them, rather than in August.
If you are resitting, that starts with your marked script and the list of every question that scored zero.
For teachers reading over a student’s shoulder
The pattern above is the argument for marking practice papers to question level often, rather than marking mocks thoroughly twice a year. It is also the reason it usually does not happen: doing it by hand for a full cohort costs hours nobody has.
That is the specific problem Marky exists to solve. See how it marks a paper.