What happens to your exam paper once you finish it?

More than one million students sit GCSEs and National 5s every year in the UK – which translates to an estimated 12 to 14 million individual exam papers.

These all somehow have to be marked in time for Results Day in August – but how? Here, BBC Bitesize steps inside an exam board depot to learn how it all works.

Formal written exams don’t date back as far as you might think, because it only became mandatory to attend school with the 1870 Education Act - and even then, only for children aged between five and 10.

Frustrated that they had no standardised way of measuring students’ progress, schools asked universities like Oxford and Cambridge to design exams they could sit locally. This began for boys in 1858, while girls weren’t allowed to sit public exams until almost 10 years later in 1867.

Pupils who were 16 and under sat junior exams, while those aged 17 or 18 sat senior ones – much like our GCSE and A level system today. The subjects examined were also quite similar, including English Language and Literature,Arithmetic,History and Latin.

These exams relied heavily on students’ memories. For example, geography exams might ask them to draw maps of specific countries with their rivers and mountains depicted. One history exam set by Cambridge in 1858 asked students to ‘name in order the Queens and children of Henry VIII. On what grounds was he divorced from his first wife?’

One thing that was very different was the timetable. In the 19th century, students usually sat exams over six or seven consecutive days in the morning, afternoon and evening. Nowadays, GCSEs and A levels take place over a period of two months in May and June.

GCSEs, or General Certificates of Secondary Education, were introduced for England,Wales and Northern Ireland in the 1980s. Advanced Levels were first sat in 1951. In Scotland, the closest equivalent to GCSEs is the National 5 qualification.

When the first GCSEs were sat in 1988, they were graded from A to G. In England, that scale has been replaced by the 9 to 1 system, while in Wales and Northern Ireland, GCSEs are graded from A* to G. National 5s are marked from A to D.

It’s not just the grades that have changed over time – it’s also the way papers are marked. Until the early 1900s, representatives from local exam boards like Oxford and Cambridge would travel to exam centres themselves to supervise and grade papers. Exams were sat in venues like schools, village halls and churches. Nowadays, invigilators are usually hired directly by schools and aren't involved in marking.

As the 20th century went on, papers were gathered, posted to depots and given manually to markers who made their notes in red ink. Until the early 2000s, one examiner generally marked the whole paper, with points added up page-by-page. Marked papers and totals sheets were posted back to exam boards for data processing.

In the video below, BBC News journalist Hannah Karpel visits AQA’s depot in Milton Keynes to see how the process works now – and it looks very different to how it did in the 1850s…

One term you’ve probably heard a lot about if you’re sitting exams is grade boundaries. In the 19th century, exams were usually scored as ‘pass’, ‘fail’ or ‘distinction’, with the outcome determined solely by the student’s performance.

From the mid-20th century, however, ‘norm referencing’ was introduced. Exam boards set a fixed percentage of students who could pass or fail based on a ‘bell curve’ of ability.

For example, rather than simply needing to achieve 80% of the marks to get an A, the grade depended on how the score compared to the rest of the cohort. Most people would get average grades, with very few getting high or low grades.

Today, grade boundaries are set after exams are marked rather than in advance. That way, if an exam is more difficult than it has been in previous years, the minimum amount of marks needed for each grade drops accordingly.

GCSE Results Day usually takes place on the Thursday of the fourth week of August, while in Scotland results are generally released in the first week of that month. In 2026, that’s 20 and 4 August respectively.

We’ve seen what happens to exam papers once you’ve sat them – but where do they go once you have your results?

Exam boards keep scanned versions of exam papers for several months in case students or schools want to appeal a grade or request a re-mark. Schools can ask for access to these papers, for example if a student received a much lower grade than expected.

Physical copies of exam papers are stored for a set time before being destroyed – usually through shredding and recycling. Official certificates displaying each student’s grades are sent to schools about three months after Results Day.

This article was written in August 2026

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