Most IB Diploma families focus on final results. The score their child receives in July of Grade 12 after examinations are marked is what they spend two years preparing for. What is less well understood is that for UK university applications, the critical academic data point is not the final grade but the predicted grade: the score a teacher formally submits months before any examination takes place, which drives the conditional offer, which in turn drives every subsequent admissions decision.
A student who achieves 40 points in their final examinations but had predicted grades of 35 has already accepted a conditional offer calibrated to 35. A student who achieves 35 but had predicted grades of 40 may have conditional offers they cannot meet. The prediction and the final result matter in sequence, not interchangeably. Understanding how predictions are set, when they are submitted, and what determines them is as strategically important as understanding what the final examination demands.
What Predicted Grades Are and When They Are Submitted
A predicted grade is the IB score a student's teachers formally submit to universities before the final examination session takes place. It is not a guess. It is a teacher's considered assessment, based on evidence accumulated over Grade 11 and the early months of Grade 12, of the most likely outcome for each subject the student is taking.
For UK university applications, predicted grades are submitted through UCAS, the UK's centralised university application system, at the time the student's application is submitted. The standard UCAS application deadline for most UK undergraduate programmes is January 15 of the student's final school year. For Medicine, Dentistry, Veterinary Science, and Oxford and Cambridge applications, the deadline is October 15.
This timeline is critical: for a student applying to Medicine at UK universities, the predicted grade submitted in October of Grade 12 is based on evidence from approximately 12 to 14 months of the Diploma, covering all of Grade 11 and the first few weeks of Grade 12. For other UK programmes, the prediction submitted in January of Grade 12 is based on roughly 18 months of evidence. Final results arrive in July.
UK universities receive the application, including the predicted grades, and decide whether to make a conditional offer, a rejection, or in some cases an unconditional offer, entirely on the basis of this predicted score. The conditional offer states the minimum score and often the minimum HL grades a student must achieve in their final results for the place to be confirmed. The final result confirms or denies whether those conditions are met.
IBDP: How Teachers Determine Predicted Grades
The IBO does not mandate a specific formula for setting predicted grades. Individual schools, working within IBO guidance, set their own processes. Understanding the evidence a teacher typically uses helps a student understand what they are influencing when they perform in Grade 11.
The primary evidence base is the student's internal assessment performance across the course to date, including end-of-unit tests, mid-year examinations, mock examinations, and any coursework components that have been completed and marked. A student who has sat three formal assessments in a subject over Grade 11 and scored at grades 5, 5, and 6 respectively is giving their teacher a clear trajectory to work with. A teacher setting a prediction in October of Grade 12 looks at this data and makes a professional judgment about where the student's final examination performance is most likely to land.
The second evidence source is the school's historical data on how its students' internal assessment performance correlates with final grades. A school with a long IB track record knows how its Grade 11 mock examination results typically compare to May session final grades. If the school's Grade 11 mock results consistently track about half a grade below final results, a coordinator advising teachers on predictions factors this in.