SQE2 marking criteria and mark decoder

The grades

Trained assessors grade each criterion by professional judgement. The SRA's specification gives six grades and states the end points: A is 5 marks and F is 0. The marks in between (B 4, C 3, D 2, E 1) are the evident reading of that scale, and the decoder uses them.

From grades to a station score

The SRA's marking policy builds each station score in three steps.

1. The skills grades are added and turned into a percentage of the marks available.
2. The law grades are added and turned into a percentage in the same way.
3. The two percentages are averaged, so skills and law count equally.

A worked example for a legal writing station. Skills grades B, C, B and C give 14 of 20 marks, or 70%. Law grades C, D and B give 9 of 15, or 60%. The station score is the average of 70% and 60%, which is 65%.

The client interview station works differently. The skills half is shared equally between the interview, marked by the actor playing the client, and the attendance note. The law half comes only from the attendance note.

From stations to a result

The final score is the plain average of the 16 station percentages. Oral and written stations carry the same weight. There is one pass mark for SQE2 as a whole, and no pass mark for a single station or for the oral or written stations as a group. A strong station offsets a weak one, and a strong skills half offsets a weak law half.

The pass mark is set by standard setting for each sitting, using the borderline regression method. Since January 2025 results have been reported on a scale of 0 to 500 with the pass mark always at 300. The SRA does not publish the percentage that equals 300. The last published percentage pass marks, for the 2024 sittings, were 61% to 62%. Use that only as a rough guide, because the real cut score is set for each sitting.

The criteria for each skill

Each skill has its own skills criteria. All of them except the interview share the law criteria below, and legal drafting has its own.

Every skill except drafting and the interview has the same three law criteria. They are "Apply the law correctly to the client's situation" and "Apply the law comprehensively to the client's situation". The third is "Identify any ethical and professional conduct issues and exercise judgment to resolve them honestly and with integrity". Legal drafting uses "Draft a document which is legally correct", "Draft a document which is legally comprehensive" and the same ethics criterion.

The ethics criterion is new for assessments from 1 September 2026. Before then, ethics was part of the comprehensiveness criterion.

Language, spelling and grammar

Language is marked only where a task has a language criterion: case and matter analysis, legal research, legal writing and legal drafting. The attendance note has none. The SRA's guidance says candidates should not lose marks for spelling mistakes a spell checker would catch, or for grammar slips, unless they affect legal accuracy, clarity or certainty. The performance indicators judge language by its effect on the reader: whether the reader can follow it, and whether it suits the recipient. A wrong name, date or figure is different. It can make the advice or the document wrong, which affects the law grades.

Using the decoder

Enter the grades from a marked answer, ours or a tutor's, and the decoder shows the station percentage with its skills and law halves. The useful number is not the total. It is the half and the criterion that pull the total down, because those are where the next practice task should go. The SQE2 mock exam page explains how a full set of stations is scored, the SQE2 pass rate page shows how each sitting went, and plans and prices shows how marked practice is included. The SQE2 hub has the overview.