For exam route schools, you're back to business-as-usual... except for the amendments to Paper 2 and Paper 3 and the fact that all coursework has been externally marked. Predicted grades won't feature.

EUR Category 1 Remarks can be requested if the student consents (they need to be aware that grades can go up, down or stay the same). As the student's teacher you will have a key role to play in deciding whether this is likely to be in the student's best interest - by considering whether the IA and exam scores achieved were what you anticipated and by checking how close the total is to the boundaries.

Exams did not take place in a large number of schools. In these non-exam route schools, a predicted grade took the place of examination components. All coursework has been externally marked.

This makes the post-results process a little more tricky to navigate (especially as it is new even to your Coordinator):

• EUR Category 1 Remarks can be requested for the IA if the student consents (they need to be aware that grades can go up, down or stay the same). As the student's teacher you will have a key role to play in deciding whether this is likely to be in the student's best interest - by considering whether the IA score achieved was what you anticipated and by checking how close the total is to the boundaries.
• If the predicted grade appears to be less than your proposal, check with your Coordinator in case an administrative error may have occured. These can be corrected free-of-charge via the Coordinator and IB Support.
• Increased predicted grades could be the result of an 'IA uplift', where the IA results have indicated to the IB that your cohort is better than usual.
• A Student-initiated Predicted Grade Enquiry (SiPGE) can be launched by students on the basis that the teacher judgement could not reasonably have been formed from the evidence used or because the department/school more broadly did not follow correct procedures (e.g. using slightly different evidence if the student experienced adverse circumstances at the time the work was completed). Whether or not the school agrees with the enquiry, a written statement, a mark book and three pieces of evidence (not including the IA) should be sent to the IB for their consideration.

This last option for students sounds quite alarming at first glance - what if every student wants to simply 'have a go' at increasing all six of their subject predictions? However, the burden on the student to overturn the teacher (and Coordinator)'s decision is enormously high. Even in the unlikely event that extra pieces of timed, supervised or authenticated evidence (from near the end of the course) come to light that you did not consider, the student would still need to demonstrate that you could not reasonably have come to the grade that you did. How to prepare? Talk to your Coordinator and perhaps suggest that they collate evidence from internal exams (etc) now rather than during the summer vacation.

The potentially more concerning aspect of this IB policy is that it fails to acknowledge that some schools may not have challenged (or been unsuccessful in challenging) the initial distribution through the exceptions process and so there may be some predicted grades that were always destined to be too low for the individual candidates. There is also, once more, a great weight placed on the IA (which could have been quite different in quality to a student's exams) in checking (from the IB perspective) whether predicted grades were likely to be accurate.