Your Pupil Progress trackers are a really helpful tool for producing an accurate working-at grade when students haven't yet completed work for all of their units, but this sometimes can cause some minor confusion when it seems that their unit grades are at odds with their overall grade. This tends to be because your tracker uses national grade boundaries for each unit, but then the overall grade boundaries in the summary section.

To highlight this, we will take a look at GCSE AQA Drama as an example (although this is relatively common across GCSE and A-Level qualifications). The 11x/Dr1 class in the example below have only completed work for the written unit (unit 1), with no data in the tracker currently for units 2 and 3. However, as you can see, their average units grades are all lower than the grade they received for that particular unit:

Whilst it would be understandable that what they have achieved on this unit are also their current working-at grades, this is not always the case. As we can see below, the grade boundaries for unit 1 (which are visible on your tracker by toggling Tools and clicking Change under 'Grade Boundaries') are substantially lower than those for units 2 and 3:

As an example, the student John Beaker has achieved 56/80 on unit 1, which according to the grade boundaries being used on the tracker (2022 +3%) would give him a grade 8. However, the same grade would require 65 marks on unit 2 and 70 marks on unit 3 (if scaled to the same max marks).

To calculate John's scaled average unit marks, his 56 marks will be multiplied by 2.5 (as unit 1 is worth 40% of the overall course), which in turn gives him 140 scaled marks as can be seen in the first screenshot. When comparing these to the tracker's grade boundaries, 140 overall marks would be just a few marks short of a 7 due to the higher boundaries in the other two units.

Of course, if you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out to our support team and we would be glad to discuss this further: