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What mock exam results tell you

A mock grade tells you where your child’s work stood on one day, months before the real exams. This is how to read it, what to ask the teacher and what to do next.

Quick guide for parents and carers · 3 minute read

Mocks are practice exams that your child’s school sets and marks itself. The school chooses the dates and the papers, so its calendar is the place to check. The marks are real. The grade attached to them is the school’s estimate.

What mocks are for

  • Practice at the real thing: the full time, exam conditions and, for Literature, a closed book.
  • A list of what to work on next, for your child and for the teacher.
  • A trial run for any access arrangements. JCQ, the Joint Council for Qualifications, counts “mock examinations” as part of a student’s normal way of working, so extra time or a word processor should be used in the mocks too. Extra time and other access arrangements explains why that matters.
  • Evidence in reserve. Ofqual, the exams regulator, asks schools to collect evidence of each student’s performance that could be used to decide grades “in the unlikely event that exams and assessments could not go ahead as planned”. In its guide for schools for 2026 it told them to “avoid over-assessment”, with one set of mocks likely to be enough for that purpose.

Why a mock grade is an estimate

  1. The grade boundaries are borrowed. Real boundaries are set once each summer’s marking is nearly finished, so a mock has to use boundaries from an earlier year, and they move. In AQA’s English Language, a grade 4 needed 73 marks out of 160 in 2025 and 75 in 2026.
  2. Essay marking involves judgement. Your child’s own teachers mark the mock, and trained examiners can differ too. Ofqual’s research on marking notes that “For more subjective questions, there may be legitimate differences in applying the mark scheme between different examiners”.
  3. A GCSE grade comes from two papers added together. If the mock was one paper, or part of one, the grade is a guess at the whole.
  4. A mock comes months before the exams, sometimes before the whole course has been taught.

So read a mock grade as a range. A mark two or three below a boundary and a mark two or three above it describe almost the same paper. The comments on each answer tell you more than the grade does.

Questions to ask the teacher

  • Which paper did the mock use, and was it the whole paper?
  • Which year’s grade boundaries did you use?
  • Which level was each long answer in, and what would have moved it up a level?
  • Which one or two things should my child work on first?
  • Will the result be used for anything else, such as predicted grades for sixth form or college applications?

The weeks after

Start with the feedback. Turn the teacher’s comments into a short list and work on one thing at a time, in the order the teacher suggests.

If quotations were the problem, start quizzing now: Helping with English revision shows how, without needing to know the texts yourself. If timing was the problem, have your child redo one answer in exam time two or three weeks later and compare the two.

For a plan that runs up to the exams, the free Year 11 countdown gives one focus a week for the last twelve weeks. What GCSE grades 4, 5 and 7 mean explains how boundaries are set, and What a grade 4, 6 and 8 answer looks like shows what moves an answer up.

If the result knocked your child’s confidence, Helping with exam worries has ideas and places to get support.

Sources

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