Grade Boundaries & Predicted Grades

In addition to the two routes students may be assessed on in May 2021, the IBO will also make changes to grade boundaries and how schools provide students' predicted grades. Both of these changes attempt to improve the accuracy with which students final grades are awarded.

Grade Boundaries

The IBO has said it will modify grade boundaries (the minimum score/percentage a student needs to achieve a particular mark in a single assessment or overall) to account for lost teaching time this year due to the coronavirus pandemic. It has also said that it will set grade boundaries independently between the 'Examination' and 'Non-Examination' routes to ensure a parity in attainment in case one route ends up being more or less difficult than the other and to ensure students on one route are not disadvantaged.

Examination Route

Modifying grade boundaries is something the IBO does with every examination period; it is a process which takes into account the strength of students in a given year, the difficulty of the exam etc. with the aim of seeing similar quantities of students achieving certain grades each year. The IBO expects that boundaries will be lowered this year to allow for the number of students achieving particular grades in a subject to be broadly similar to previous years, despite the disruption to their learning due to COVID-19 and that their performance in exams will likely be weaker than students in previous years.

Rather than just instituting a blanket change to grade boundaries before exams, the IBO will instead wait until after students have sat exams. They will consider:

• how both a sample of and students overall performed
• how students' performance compares to predicted grades
• how students' performance compared statistically in comparison with other years

Using this information, the IBO will decide on grade boundaries that most fairly distributes students between grades as appropriate.

The IBO has already reduced the quantity of material students must cover in preparation for their exams. They announced this reduced assessment model last summer.

Non-Examination Route

Normally students' written assessed tasks are marked by their school teachers. A sample of those assessments are then 'moderated' by the IBO and all students grades are changed depending on the extent to which the moderator agrees with the teacher's marking.

This year, almost every piece of written assessed work students produce will be marked by a teacher and an IBO Examiner to help ensure similar standards of assessment are applied to students on the 'non-examination' route as on the 'examination route'.

Predicted Grades

Predicted grades - provided by teachers - will be important for students on the 'non-examination' route - replacing the weighting of exams for each subject (see above). The IBO has said that predicted grades in 2020 we're higher than previous years and in response has committed to 'recommend generous guidelines within which teachers will be asked to submit their predictions'.

In addition, where schools or teachers are concerned the IBO's guidelines are overly restrictive, the IBO has announced a more robust system to allow schools to lodge requests for a modified grade distribution on a student's behalf.