Will I be able to resit my GCSES (and how?)

I sat my GCSES this summer and I think I messed up most of my exams. I was predicted all 9s from my December mocks in Year 11, so I guess I got overconfident and didn't take my revision as seriously after that - leading me to doing not as well as I wanted to in my exams. I still believe rather than getting all 9s as I was predicted, I'll get a couple 9s, and mostly 7s and 8s and then 1 or 2 6s.

It does seem like good grades, but I want to apply to Oxbridge and I go to a grammar school, so when they look at my GCSE grades it probably wont look good when they compare it to how well other people from my school did.

I mostly messed up in the exams for the subjects that I am good at (that I will be taking for A level) as I didn't revise for those so I was wondering if I would be able to resit them, as I know that if I had revised properly, I could have achieved top grades and if I can resit them, how I would go on to do that.

Reply 1

gdunne42

Original post by DangerJourney

I sat my GCSES this summer and I think I messed up most of my exams. I was predicted all 9s from my December mocks in Year 11, so I guess I got overconfident and didn't take my revision as seriously after that - leading me to doing not as well as I wanted to in my exams. I still believe rather than getting all 9s as I was predicted, I'll get a couple 9s, and mostly 7s and 8s and then 1 or 2 6s.
It does seem like good grades, but I want to apply to Oxbridge and I go to a grammar school, so when they look at my GCSE grades it probably wont look good when they compare it to how well other people from my school did.
I mostly messed up in the exams for the subjects that I am good at (that I will be taking for A level) as I didn't revise for those so I was wondering if I would be able to resit them, as I know that if I had revised properly, I could have achieved top grades and if I can resit them, how I would go on to do that.

It's not likely that retaking GCSE to achieve top grades would significantly boost your application. They will see your original grades and note that you needed retakes to improve them.

Preparing for retakes in summer 2025 is likely to interfere with your preparation for end of year 12 assessments that would heavily influence your predicted grades for university application.

If you do want to retake any GCSE you would probably have to do it by paying to enter for the exams as a private candidate. You could ask your school if they would support this. They might, for example to boost a maths GCSE grade to the level required by a university, but if they think it's a bad idea you might have to find another exam centre where you can do it and then take time off to attend the exams.