Scottish Nationals and Highers: How to appeal if you don't get the grades you're expecting

• If you don’t get the grades you expect in your Nationals or Highers and you think there may have been an issue, you have the right to appeal
• The appeal process is free, and opens on results day itself
• Your exam itself will not be re-marked as part of the re-assessment
• There are deadlines students must apply by, especially if they need their appeal prioritised

At long last, results day is almost here for Scottish students.

On Tuesday, 6 August, pupils who sat their National, Higher, and even Advanced Higher exams will finally find out how they did. It marks an end to more than two months of waiting since exams wrapped up in late May - a period often wracked with tension for young people, with conditional university offers often hinging on their results.

Finding out you didn’t do as well as you had hoped can be another crushing blow. It can leave university hopefuls who thought they had everything sorted out navigating the sometimes confusing Clearing process, or uncertain as to what else their future might hold now.

Sometimes, however, students might believe that the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA), which administers the country’s high school exam system, is the one that got it wrong. In that case, they have the right to appeal their grade.

But how exactly do you go about doing this, and how does the process work at SQA’s end? Here’s what you need to know:

How to appeal your National or Higher results

If you think there might be a problem with your results or final grades, you should consider speaking to a careers counsellor or other members of your school or college’s leadership team first. They should be able to give you some advice around what your next steps should be, and whether you should try appealing your grades or not.

Students who believe there may have been an issue with how their exams were marked can appeal their grade (Photo: National World/Adobe Stock)

To appeal your grades, the student in question needs to sign up to the SQA website (not to be confused with MySQA) which will be found online here from results day until appeals close. You will need to verify your email address, and supply your full name, date of birth, Scottish Candidate Number - which can be found on your certificate - and which course you want to appeal.

You’ll then be able to submit and withdraw appeals through the online portal. This is a free service, and you won’t be asked to pay anything.

Schools or even parents - with permission, of course - can also appeal a student’s grades for them. If you have a conditional university, college or training offer waiting, you may also be able to apply for the priority appeals service to get your review through faster. In this instance, you’ll need to either get your school to apply on your behalf - or to validate that you do in fact have a conditional offer, if appealing yourself.

There are also some cases where you will not be allowed to appeal a grade. These include if you’ve already got an A (the highest grade available), if a penalty was applied due to malpractice (like cheating), or if your grade was awarded through the Examination Exceptional Circumstances Consideration Service - which is for students who had to miss their exam due to exceptional circumstances out of their control.

How do appeals work?

If you do opt to appeal your results, SQA says your exam itself will not actually be re-marked. Instead, a “senior appointee” will review the marking itself.

What they will check includes whether all parts of your SQA assessments were marked, whether the marking was in line with national standards, whether the marks given for each answer were totalled correctly, and whether the correct result has been entered into the system.

SQA warns that after their review is complete, your results might stay the same. But they could also go up or even down, depending on what they find. The review outcome will be final.

When do students need to appeal by?

Appeals open on results day itself, at 9am. But there are in fact deadlines students will need to apply by if they do intend to appeal their results.

Those with a conditional place at university or college - or who are in training or employment that depends on their grade - can access the priority appeals service. The latest date you can apply for a priority appeal is Tuesday 13 August, at 11.59 pm.

All other appeals must be filed by Tuesday 27 August, at 11.59pm.

The wait for results day can be an anxious time for students, and for parents and carers trying to support them. SQA has put together a webpage with some advice and links to follow if you or a young person in your life start to feel stressed or overwhelmed. You can check it out online here.