Predicted grades
The mocks decide the prediction
Medical schools do not see your final grades when they decide who to interview. They see a number your school writes in the autumn of Year 13, and that number comes mostly from mock papers.
How the prediction is actually made
There is no formula and no central rule. Each school writes its own predictions, usually in the first half of the autumn term in Year 13, and almost all of them build the figure from the same evidence: the Year 12 end-of-year exams, any Year 13 mock sat before the UCAS deadline, and the teacher’s view of classwork and trajectory.
That timing is the part families miss. The UCAS deadline for medicine, dentistry and veterinary courses is 15 October, six in the evening, UK time. Everything the prediction rests on has already happened by then. A student who plans to turn it around in the spring of Year 13 has made their plan too late for the application, even if they go on to get the grades.
Why it matters more for medicine than for other courses
Most medical schools publish a minimum predicted grade requirement, commonly AAA, with some asking A*AA and some lower under contextual schemes. An application predicted below the stated threshold is frequently screened out before the personal statement is read and before any interview is offered. The published entry requirements for every UK medical school are collected by the Medical Schools Council, and they are the thing to check before anything else.
For a course with an open deadline and a conditional offer, a slightly soft prediction is survivable. For medicine, where four choices close in October and interview places are allocated from that pool, it often is not.
The uncomfortable statistic
Predictions are not accurate, and they miss in a predictable direction. Research by Dr Gill Wyness at UCL for the University and College Union, using UCAS data from the 2013 to 2015 cycles, found that around 16 per cent of A-Level predictions matched the grades the student went on to achieve, about 75 per cent were higher than the eventual result, and roughly 8 per cent were lower.
Read that the right way round. For most applicants, the prediction is the generous number and the final grades are the hard part. Getting predicted AAA opens the door; the conditional offer then has to be met in June, with no second look. So the work does not stop when the form is submitted, and a student who treats the prediction as the finish line is the one who loses the place in August.
What we do about it
- Mocks are treated as real exams. Full papers, timed, closed book, marked against the official mark scheme rather than generously. A mock marked kindly is worse than no mock, because it buys confidence and costs information.
- We work backwards from the mock calendar. Tell us when the Year 12 summer exams and the Year 13 mocks fall and we plan the topic order around them, so the content is covered before the paper rather than after it.
- Marks are traced to causes. Every paper gets a breakdown of where the marks went: content not known, content known but not applied, command word misread, time lost. Those four need different fixes and most students only ever hear the total.
- Evidence a teacher can use. Marked papers and a written progress summary each month give a student something concrete to take to the teacher writing the prediction. Teachers are not obstacles here, and a student who turns up with evidence of an upward trend gets a fairer hearing than one who turns up with a request.
- Then the finals. From the moment the form is in, the target changes from the prediction to the offer. Same subjects, same tutor, different pressure.
What we will not claim
We cannot change a prediction. The school writes it, and it should reflect the work. What tutoring can do is change the evidence the prediction is written from, which is a slower and more honest route to the same place. Anyone who offers you the first thing is selling something they do not have.
Where this sits
This is the academic half of a medical application. The other half is choosing where to send it: how to build a shortlist that fits the profile. The subject teaching behind both is A-Level Chemistry, Biology and Maths, and the GCSE sciences before them.
How we teach it
- Timed questions from the first lesson. Students who only ever work untimed are practising a different skill from the one being examined.
- Work set between lessons, and marked. An hour a week changes very little on its own. The work in between is where the grade moves.
- A full paper under exam conditions every four weeks. Same timing, same silence, no notes. The score is recorded so progress is a number.
- Written progress to parents every month. What was covered, what the scores were, what we are working on next.
- Groups capped at five, or one-to-one if that suits better.
Start with the free diagnostic
Every student begins the same way: one full hour under exam conditions, marked against the real mark scheme, followed by a written summary of where the marks are going and what we would do about it. It costs nothing, and the assessment is yours to keep whether or not you carry on.