KS4 Exams and First Entry Rules (Admin)

There are a few additional things to consider when working specifically with KS4 exam grades. Firstly, Analytics uses the ‘Exams Date’ or ‘Results Date’ associated to an exam grades file (or individual grades) to determine when they were sat, and define the student’s first entry. To identify the entry date for an exam, the DfE state the following:

"The date of the first (or only) examination for a qualification is taken as the entry date. These dates are used to decide which qualification counts as the first entry. Examination dates are available from the respective exam boards. In cases where exams in the same subject are scheduled for different days in the same series, only the qualification with the earlier exam counts in performance measures.

In cases where qualifications have no formal examination date, the certification date or coursework deadline date is used as the examination date. Further information on these dates can be obtained from the respective exam boards."

In order for exam grades to be given the appropriate dates, it may be worth splitting up the grades files. Therefore, we recommend considering the following:

• Upload banked exam grades as and when they come into school, to make managing exam grades and their dates easier (as they’re then more likely to reflect when they were sat).
• If you’re uploading exam grades retrospectively, consider splitting these based on exam season during which they were sat (e.g. Y10 Banked, Nov Results, Jan Results, etc.).

However, you would need to specify the exams date for each qualification in Analytics if you have students taking either:

• Multiple pathways of qualifications within the same exam season.
• Students taking qualifications in the same exam season which share the same official discount code (such as GCSE Dance and BTEC Dance).

You could do this by splitting these grades out into more files based on their discounting pathway. For example, one file containing ‘Science Combined’ grades and another containing individual Biology/Chemistry/Physics grades. The screenshot below is an example of how grades files could be split based on exam season and Science discounting pathways.

Alternatively, you could upload the grades in a single file with a generic exams date (typically the results date for most of the exams in the file) and manually edit the exams date for specific grades via Grades Management.

To do this, click GRADES > Grades Management > select ‘Exams’ in the dropdown > click on the Grade count for the qualification, place a tick next to the grade(s) and click ‘Edit Date’.

Thanks for reading!