A levels and GCSEs
If you are planning to take an AQA, Edexcel or OCR GCSE or A level in fact anything other than an IGCSE, you will need to return to the UK for examinations. There are international centres that can offer these qualifications but they are currently prohibited from entering private candidates. In order to sit at one of these centres you would need to have an existing relationship with them and they would have to be prepared to accept you as one of their own internal candidates. In the case of exams with Non-exam Assessment (NEA) the centre would need to be able to supervise, authenticate and mark the NEA using their own tutors.
International GCSEs
All of our international GCSEs (IGCSEs) can be entered and taken at any centre abroad that is willing to help private candidates. These are usually International schools, British schools for ex-pat. children or the British Councils.
Please be aware that all examinations must be taken at the same time as exams in the UK. For example, An exam starting at 14:00 UTC in the UK, would start at the same time in Accra, Ghana, as we are in the same time zone, but would start at 16:00 in Istanbul or at 02:00 in Wellington New Zealand. They may therefore require “R” papers.
What are R papers
To prevent students living in time zones which are out of sync with GMT from having to sit exams in the middle of the night, Edexcel also offers R Papers which start 12 hours later. They are the same in structure and difficulty but the content is designed to be different so that students cannot get knowledge of the questions beforehand. Taking our example from above, the exam in Wellington could either be a normal paper starting at 02.00 local time (obviously not very acceptable) or an R paper with different questions which would start at 14:00 local time. Centres in the middle of these two extremes can opt to set either the R or the standard paper. So going back to our example of an exam starting at 14;00, a centre in Bangkok, Thailand could offer the standard paper starting at 20:00 local time or the R paper starting 02:00 local time.
The choice of standard or R papers is entirely down to the examination centre and you will need to confirm with them which paper you have been entered for.
