Today, thousands of students around the world are celebrating their success as they receive their Cambridge IGCSE and O Level results.
It has been a very demanding year for Cambridge International students and all have worked incredibly hard to overcome the many challenges of the pandemic, in order to gain their qualifications and move forward with their next educational steps.
After months of dedication and commitment to their studies, more than 240,000 students have received their Cambridge IGCSE and O Level results today and we congratulate all of them on their success.
These achievements would not have been possible without the extraordinary efforts of their schools, teachers and families, and we are incredibly grateful to them for all they have done to help and support students throughout a very demanding year.
Christine Özden, Chief Executive, Cambridge International said:
‘I would like to congratulate all of our students around the world on their results today, which mean they will be able to continue with their next steps, whether that is further study or launching their careers.
In a year like no other, our students have overcome the many challenges brought by the Covid-19 pandemic, including school closures and learning from home, to gain their qualifications. This is a fantastic achievement and demonstrates their resilience and dedication to their studies over the past year.
I would also like to thank our schools and teachers for their dedication and commitment in helping students to achieve their qualifications. These results are the outcome of the hard work of all involved, often in very challenging circumstances and you should all be very proud of what you have achieved.’
Our priorities have been to keep students and school staff safe and to enable as many students as possible to progress with their education during the pandemic. To ensure this, we adapted our approach to our June 2021 series and for the first time ever, we assessed students by both exams and school-assessed grades.
We ran exams in most countries – three quarters of our students worldwide took exams in this series including students in China. We engaged with education authorities, governments, local authorities and schools to develop robust guidance to ensure exams could run safely. Where exams could not take place safely, including in the UK, we offered a school assessment approach using students’ work.
We invested significant extra resource to provide both exams and school-assessed grades and put a range of measures and new systems in place. These included creating new IT systems to manage school-assessed grades; putting support in place for schools and teachers to help them run our school-assessment process; offering exemptions from some assessments that were hard to run during the pandemic and adaptations to enable students to take assessments differently.
Overall, Cambridge IGCSE and O Level grades have risen slightly this year, when compared to June 2019 results – the last year that all Cambridge students took exams. The increase is between half and two-thirds of a grade, very slightly higher than in 2020.
This year’s June 2021 series has been our largest ever, despite the pandemic. This week we have issued almost 1.5 million grades, to over half a million students, in over 5,500 schools in 146 countries.
