Exam results day in Scotland falls on Tuesday 8 August this year. Here at Tes Scotland we are poised to provide our readers with comprehensive analysis of the results and statistics published by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA).

UPDATE: SQA results 2023: post-Covid pass rates fall again

In the 2022-23 school year some changes to assessment - including reductions in coursework and the removal of topics from the exam - remained in place in a bid to acknowledge that “the impact of the pandemic is still being felt by learners and practitioners”.

The SQA, however, has made it clear that these modifications will cease next year for most courses - a move that has been criticised by the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association, which says students are not ready to return to the previous regime.

This year the SQA has also said it will “continue to be sensitive” to the ongoing impact of the pandemic when it comes to grading exams.

Scotland’s exam results day: key trends to expect

Bearing all of this in mind, here are some of the key issues to look out for when the results are published next month:

National qualification pass rates will come under scrutiny - so what’s likely to happen?

The SQA has said its approach to setting standards and grading “will continue to be sensitive to the extent of the ongoing impact of the pandemic”.

Last year the body said there would be a more generous approach to grading exams. The result was pass rates at National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher that were higher than the last time exams were sat - before the pandemic in 2019 - but lower than in 2020 and 2021, when the exams were cancelled and teachers were responsible for grading students.

For example, the Higher A-C pass rate in 2019 was 74.8 per cent; in 2021 it was 87.3 per cent and in 2022 it was 78.9 per cent.

So this year it seems likely that - as exam bodies in other parts of the UK have made clear - the SQA will be keen to move closer to the kind of pass rates seen in 2019. That will mean the pass rates drop this year, compared with last year, but are still higher than in 2019. 

Responding to this suggestion, Martyn Ware, director of policy, analysis and standards at the SQA, said that “whilst it may be anticipated that outcomes for many courses will fall within the range bounded by the 2022 and 2019 outcomes”, no target outcomes had been set, and the SQA’s focus would be “on setting grades and maintaining standards based on the evidence of learners’ performance”.

What will happen to the attainment gap?

If the pass rate falls, the disadvantage-related attainment gap will likely widen this year in comparison with last year because fewer students from disadvantaged backgrounds will gain national qualifications.

The big growth in the attainment gap, of course, came last year when the gap between those from the least and most deprived backgrounds gaining an A-C pass at Higher went from 7.8 percentage points in 2021 to 15 percentage points, with the return of national exams.

The government, however, was keen to point out that the attainment gap was narrower last year than it had been the last time exams were sat in 2019, when the gap was 16.9 percentage points. The question is, will the gap continue to narrow in comparison with 2019 this year - or will it grow?

Students are likely to continue to gain a wider range of qualifications

Last year, when she was education secretary, Shirley-Anne Somerville said the results illustrated “the wide range of qualifications” that learners were choosing and that she welcomed “the increase in skills-based awards”.

We have heard criticism recently that “our language on qualifications is a maze of confusing terms”, and calls for “a common language to describe each qualification according to the level of learning being delivered”. In 2018 Ollie Bray, who is now an Education Scotland strategic director but was then a headteacher working in Highland, suggested that even school leaders did not fully understand the range of qualifications that were available in Scotland.

However, while the array of qualifications that schools can offer is somewhat bewildering, it seems that they are increasingly offering National Progression Awards and National Certificates and Foundation Apprenticeships - as well as national qualifications. It is likely, therefore, that this will once again be reflected in the attainment statistics published next month.

What changes can we expect in the popularity of different subjects?

Entries for N5 applications of mathematics have risen sharply in recent years, going from around 2,500 in 2018 to over 14,000 last year. That is partly because schools are entering high-attaining students for both N5 maths and N5 applications of mathematics, but there is confidence that the qualification - launched in 2017-18 as a replacement for the old “lifeskills mathematics” qualification - is resulting in more students gaining a maths qualification at N5 level. Last year a Higher in the subject was introduced and attracted 870 entries. It will be interesting to see if that figure has grown in 2023.

In terms of the entries for other Higher subjects, patterns in uptake between 2016 - the first year the new Highers were fully introduced - and 2022 tell us that subjects such as French, German, history, design and manufacture and physics have seen a decline in entries, while PE, politics and human biology are attracting more entries.

Will more students challenge their results this year?

Appeals this year will be free of charge and students will be able to make a request for a review of their marked exam paper directly to the SQA, without having to go through their school.

This year essentially marks the return of the old “post-results service”, which was in place before the pandemic. However, students had no direct route of appeal back then and the SQA charged schools for unsuccessful appeals, so it seems likely that appeals will rise this year in comparison with 2019.

Last year appeals were also free and students had a direct route of appeal. However, they could only appeal if their final grade was lower than their predicted grade, and appeals were based on alternative assessment evidence gathered over the course of the year by schools.

SQA said that this year it was returning to the old system because an evaluation of the appeals service put in place last year found that it had increased teacher workload “substantially”, led to more assessment and was widely perceived as unfair.

In 2019 the SQA received 11,528 appeals; last year it received over 58,000.