Predicted grades and how they reach your universities

The number your entire university application rests on is produced by your teachers, months before your exams, from work you are still finishing.

Where the number comes from

Your subject teachers predict the grade they believe you will achieve in the final examination. It is a professional judgement, informed by mocks, coursework and classwork. It is not an average, and not a calculation you can appeal by arithmetic. Schools submit predicted grades to the IB alongside Internal Assessment marks, by 20 April for the May session.

How they reach universities

For UCAS, predicted grades go on your reference and are visible to every course you apply to. That reference is written in the autumn. So the prediction that decides your offers is made from evidence generated in DP1 and early DP2, well before the IA work that determines your actual result.

Which surprises people: improving dramatically in February does not improve the prediction sent in October. The leverage is earlier than almost anyone treats it.

What you can actually influence

Mocks matter more than they feel like they do. For most teachers they are the single largest piece of evidence available when predicting. Treating them as a rehearsal rather than an assessment is a costly misunderstanding.

Early IA drafts count as evidence too. A strong first IA draft in DP1 shapes a teacher's picture of you at exactly the moment the picture is forming.

Ask, once, properly. If you believe a prediction is out of step with your recent work, ask what evidence it is based on and what would change it. That is a reasonable conversation. A campaign is not, and teachers talk to each other.

What you cannot do

You cannot see your predicted grades unless your school chooses to share them, you cannot negotiate them as a grade, and neither we nor anyone else can influence them. Any service implying otherwise is selling you something that does not exist.

If the prediction is below your offer

Apply anyway, and apply wider. Predictions are routinely missed in both directions, and several European systems, Dutch numerus fixus, Danish Quota 2 and the Irish CAO, do not work off predictions at all in the way UCAS does. That spread is exactly the argument for holding applications across more than one system.

Working out where to apply with the grades you have? That is the admissions side of this company: a written plan across six European systems is $175.