Predicted grades, explained — and what to do if yours is low

Predicted grades cause more anxiety per unit of understanding than anything else in the application year. They are issued by your school, they go to universities before you have sat a single final exam, and for UK applications in particular they largely determine which offers you receive. It is worth understanding precisely what they are.

Where the number comes from

A predicted grade is your subject teacher's professional judgement of the grade you are most likely to achieve in the final exams, based on the evidence they have: internal assessments, mock exams, classwork, and the trajectory across Year 12 and the first part of Year 13. It is not an average of your marks, and it is not a reward for effort. It is a forecast.

Schools moderate these across departments, because a school whose predictions are consistently optimistic is noticed by universities and its predictions are discounted in future years. That moderation is why an individually persuasive case to one teacher rarely moves a grade on its own.

How much they actually matter

• UK (UCAS): a great deal. Offers are made against predicted grades, and a prediction below a course's typical requirement usually means no offer, regardless of what you eventually achieve.
• US: less, and indirectly. Predicted grades sit alongside the full transcript, the school report and testing; a US application is read as a whole in a way a UK one is not.
• Canada, Netherlands, Ireland and much of Europe: often conditional on final results, with predictions used to make the conditional offer.

The four things that genuinely move a prediction

1. Mock exam performance. This is the single largest input in most schools, and it is the one that is still in front of you. A student who moves from a 5 to a 6 across two mock sittings has made the strongest possible case.
2. A clear upward trajectory. Teachers predict where the line is heading, not where it currently sits. Three consecutive improving results is more persuasive than one strong result.
3. Internal assessment marks, where they are complete. A strong IA raises the overall subject grade arithmetically, which raises the honest forecast.
4. Evidence of a fixed, specific weakness. "I lost most marks in Paper 2 essays; here is the work I have done on essay structure and the three graded essays since" is a case a teacher can act on.

If your prediction is below your target course

First, be accurate about the gap. A course asking 36 when you are predicted 34 is a different situation from one asking 40 when you are predicted 34, and the strategies differ.

For a one-to-two point gap, apply anyway to one or two of them, but build the rest of the list properly: courses where your prediction is comfortably above the requirement, and at least one where it is well above. In the UK a five-choice list containing five aspirational courses is the most common self-inflicted wound of the application season.

For a larger gap, the honest conversation is about the course rather than the grade — often there is a closely related course at the same or a similar university with a materially lower requirement, and it teaches most of the same material. Students frequently discover they were attached to the course title rather than the content.

And if the final grade beats the prediction

This happens often, and there is a route for it: in the UK, adjustment and clearing; elsewhere, direct appeals to admissions offices, which are more receptive to "I exceeded my prediction" than students expect. It is not a plan — you cannot rely on it — but it is a real second window, and worth knowing exists before results day rather than discovering on it.