How students found their Exams
Exam-confidence signals from post-exam polls 2026 vs 2025
How Students Found Their Exams: 2026 vs 2025
Exam confidence signals from post-exam polls on The Student Room
Every year during exam season, tens of thousands of students share their immediate reactions on The Student Room straight after walking out of the exam hall. By turning these post-exam poll responses into a single comparable weighted score, we gain an early look at student confidence and anxiety before results day even arrives.
In 2026, our dataset captured 60,000 post-exam votes across 440+ individual exam threads.
What this data is
After every exam, students on TSR vote on how it went: Great, Quite well, Not so good or Terribly. Each response is converted into a 0–100 confidence score, creating a comparable measure of how students felt immediately after sitting their papers.
Overall confidence stayed steady, but the subject story shifted
Overall exam confidence barely moved year on year, with 2026 scoring 59.8 compared with 60.5 in 2025. The bigger story is underneath the headline number, where confidence rose sharply in some subjects and softened in others.
A-level subjects: where confidence moved
Business was the weakest-performing subject this week. Both Edexcel and AQA Business discussions ranked among the bottom five for positive sentiment, while A-level Edexcel Business saw the sharpest year-on-year decline of any paper at -38.9 percentage points.
Subject Spotlights: Maths vs. Physics
Exam boards: Edexcel softened, AQA firmed up
Confidence score by board. Board mix varies by school — this shapes where softening concentrates.
GCSE is calmer — but watch the pipeline
GCSE students reported higher confidence than A-level students, with an 8-point gap between the two. Within GCSE, some subjects softened, creating a useful early signal for the next 2–3 admissions cycles.
What it means for universities
Watch subject anxiety
Maths applicants may be more anxious at results, with potential for higher remark interest and more movement in maths-heavy courses.
Tighter where confidence is higher
Physics confidence rose sharply. If confidence tracks outcomes, Physics-adjacent courses could see fewer Clearing spaces than last year.
Board concentration matters
Softening clusters around Edexcel. Where your applicants’ schools skew Edexcel, the effect may land harder.
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