---
title: Choosing a qualification when creating a markbook
description: Choosing a qualification when creating a markbook | Help & Support — GO 4 Schools
---
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# Choosing a qualification when creating a markbook
**Markbooks** are used to collect marks for your subjects. Markbooks will be automatically created for each subject in GO 4 Schools. To set up a markbook, you need to assign a qualification to the subject. Navigate to the subject page, and click on the link to go to the subject settings:
This will take you to the subject settings page. Under **Qualification** click on the **Choose...** This will open the **qualification picker:**
****
Here you can either click through the various levels to find your qualification, or use the search box to narrow down the qualifications. Alternatively if you know the QAN code you can enter that. Notice the appearance of **School scheme**, here is where you can select one of your internal grading schemes to act as a qualification.
If you are choosing a school scheme for a core subject, then you should select the appropriately named copy of the scheme you wish to use (English for English, maths for maths, etc.) An advantage of this is that where the school scheme has values, GO 4 Schools will use the special versions of the grade schemes to generate year group level statistics.
When choosing an official qualification there are **?** icons to the left of each course. These allow you to view the information about each course on the Ofqual web site, which should help you decide between two qualifications with similar names.
**You should be careful when selecting the qualification for two reasons:**
- Once a markbook is set up, you can't change from a qualification that awards one set of grades to one that awards a **different** set of grades without resetting the markbook (which will delete all marks held). For example, you cannot change the qualification from a GCSE to a vocational subject because the GCSE uses grades 9, 8, 7, etc, whereas the vocational uses grades of Pass, Merit, etc. Be especially careful with vocational subjects, where names are similar, but the grades may vary. Where a custom grading scheme has been selected you will always be required to reset the markbook to select a new qualification.
- GO 4 Schools uses the choice made to provide the set of grades available for your subject and to calculate the whole-school pass rates etc. For instance, GO 4 Schools understands the size of qualifications, if you chose the wrong qualification, GO 4 Schools will perform the wrong calculation.
If you need to change the qualification, you can do so by clicking the **Change/reset...** link that will replace the **Choose...** when a qualification is linked to a subject. If you need to change to a qualification that uses different grades, you will need a school manager to remove the existing grades.
### Special cases
- **Fine grades**: For GCSE/GCE qualifications you can choose to use either the formal grades, e.g. 9,8,7, etc or fine grades, e.g. 9+, 9, 9-, 8+, etc. The fine grades can be used to help differentiate students with high 5s from those with low 5s for example. The formal grades are those awarded by the exam boards, and have specific point scores, whereas the fine grades are simply provided for convenience. Within GO 4 Schools the fine grades carry the same point scores as the corresponding formal grades, this ensures that the numeric points calculations are accurate.
- **Key stages 1-3**: Legacy qualifications are still included in GO 4 Schools for National curriculum KS1-3 courses. These can be found under the **Key Stage 1-3** option in the qualification picker. For other KS1-3 courses you should choose the **General** qualification. Each of these qualifications is offered in two versions: a version with P Scales and a version without. There are specific qualifications for English, English Reading, English Writing (use the last two if you want to track the reading and writing strands separately), Maths and Science. For KS1-2 the schemes include scaled scores.
- **School schemes**: You can use a school-defined internal grading scheme in place of a qualification to monitor student progress using your own school measures. If your internal grading scheme has numeric or school score values assigned, it can be used in progress measurements.
- **Informal tracking**: If you want to collect marks for a subject that does not correspond to a formal qualification you can create a school scheme and incorporate any grade names for tracking purposes.
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