Page 7 - BACC Report

Draft Report on European Baccalaureate 2021
3. New Marking Scale

In April 2015, the Board of Governors approved the introduction of a New Marking System for
use at secondary in the European Schools.
The Marking System came into force gradually in three steps as follows:

Step School Year Year Group
Step 1 2018-2019 S1-S5
Step 2 2019-2020 S6
Step 3 2020 -2021 S7

For the S7, the school year 2020-2021 and the European Baccalaureate Session 2021 have
been the first ones with the use of the New Marking System.

The introduction of the marking system, together with attainment descriptors derived from the
syllabuses, represents a significant development for European Schools. The use of the system
has implications for teaching, learning and assessment in our schools.

Introductory training was provided to all schools in the spring of 2017 and other trainings
followed as well.

Guidelines were developed to offer additional support to schools and teachers in the
implementation of the marking system in practice. The guidelines assisted schools and
teachers to engage with the system in an informed way.

The guidelines include an overview of the marking system itself; a glossary of terminology and
sections on planning for teaching, learning, assessment and assessment tools and tasks; an
explanation of the use of the marking system in school reports; the European Baccalaureate
and frequently asked questions. All this information can be found on the document 2017-05-
D-29-en-9.

Much of the information in these guidelines could be evident to some of the teachers; however,
it was provided to ensure a common understanding and a common approach among teachers
and across language sections in order to support the effective implementation of the new
marking system.

The new marking system for the secondary cycle of the European Schools, decided by the
BoG at its meeting in Prague 2015, contains numerical marks and alphabetical grades,
therefore both are used for assessment, depending on the year level.

In order to continue with the more holistic approach to assessment used in the primary cycle,
in S1-S3 only grades (letters) are used, in single assessment tasks as well as in any kind of
report.

In order to support progression towards the Baccalaureate, whole and half-numerical marks
are used from S4 onwards.

In S7 decimal numerical marks are used. The overall average preliminary mark in year 7 is
expressed with whole numbers and one decimal and the overall final mark in year 7 is
expressed with whole numbers and two decimals.

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