10 Aug 2021
Thousands of students around the world are celebrating today after receiving their Cambridge International AS & A Level results.
In this very demanding year, students, their families and teachers have worked incredibly hard to overcome the challenges brought by the pandemic, which has affected them in many different ways around the world.
Today, after months of dedication and commitment to their studies, almost 170,000 students will receive their Cambridge International AS & A Level results and will now be able to progress with their next steps. We congratulate all of them on their success.
Their achievement would not have been possible without the extraordinary efforts and support 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 shows their resilience and dedication to their studies over the past year. Their families and teachers can be incredibly proud of what they have achieved.
'I would also like to recognise the incredible work and commitment of our schools and their teachers in helping our students to achieve their qualifications. These results are the outcome of the hard work of all involved, often in very challenging circumstances and I hope they will give our students and their teachers the encouragement to continue achieving great things.”
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.
As a result, this has been our largest series ever, despite the pandemic. This week we will issue almost 1.5 million grades, to over half a million students, in over 5,500 schools in 146 countries.
Overall, Cambridge International AS & A 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. We have been in regular contact with universities to make sure they understand our approach this year to the challenges of the pandemic.
Cambridge IGCSE and O Level results will be released on Thursday 12 August.