Publishing exam results

Clear the four gates that block a results publish, understand what publishing changes, and revoke without losing grade-card history.

Examinations guide for day and boarding schools.

Last updated August 29, 2026

Results publication is a single, deliberately heavy action. It rebuilds the session grade cards from every published paper, freezes marks on any published paper that was still open, flips the session result status to published, records who published it and when, and fans out notifications to students, parents, and class teachers. Because it does all of that at once, it checks its preconditions hard before doing any of it.

Freezing is the part people underestimate. Once publish has run, mark entry on the affected assessments is rejected with a locked response, and so is any edit to an assessment linked to a frozen exam paper. That is the intended behaviour - it is what makes a published result trustworthy - but it means corrections are an explicit unfreeze-and-republish, not a quiet edit.

Gates before publish

Gate	Failure	How to clear it
Session is archive-frozen	423 Locked	An archived session cannot publish or revoke at all
At least one published paper	400	Publish the papers first; an empty session has nothing to release
Every student has a mark row	409 with the missing list	Finish marking, or acknowledge incomplete marks
Class teacher sign-off where required	409 with the classes	Each listed class teacher signs off

Who may publish

Exam coordination rights are the baseline, so students and parents are excluded outright
When the session is governed by a committee, only the committee chair may publish or revoke
Platform Admin and Principal always pass the chair check
When no committee is bound to the session, any exam coordinator may act

Limits

Publishing also closes the loop with the appeals process: the revaluation queue only makes sense once families can see a mark to dispute, so set the appeals window on the session before you release rather than afterwards.

Publication is per session, not per class or per paper, so a partially marked cohort holds up the whole session
Session grade cards are separate from term report cards; publishing one does not publish the other
The revaluation window is driven by a date on the session. If it is not set, there is no automatic appeal deadline

Common questions

Quick answers in plain language.

Publish returned 409 with a list of students. What now?+

Those students have no mark row on a published paper. Either finish marking them, or repeat the publish acknowledging incomplete marks, which records that you released the session knowingly.

Publish returned 409 asking for class teacher sign-off.+

The session requires class-teacher sign-off and at least one class with papers has not signed. Sign-off cannot be waived from the publish call; the class teacher acknowledges on their class exams screen first.

Results are already published and I need to correct a mark.+

Unfreeze the paper, correct the mark, then publish again with the republish flag. Publishing without that flag on an already-published session is refused with 409 rather than silently rebuilding grade cards.

What does revoking do to grade cards?+

It sets the session to revoked so families stop seeing marks, but grade-card rows are kept. Nothing is deleted, so a later republish restores the same history rather than reconstructing it.