If you’re surprised or disappointed by your result, you might be thinking about disputing the outcome. NEBOSH has a process called “Enquiry About Results” (EAR) which allows you to challenge the mark on your assessment. The price for this varies from £18 for a Type 1 Enquiry to £118 for a Type 2 enquiry, and is only refunded if your result changes from “Refer” to “Pass”.
With this in mind, it is important to consider whether an EAR would be worthwhile, and how likely it is to be successful.
1) How close to a pass mark are you?
It is important to consider how much your mark would need to be changed to switch from pass to fail before submitting your EAR. A successful EAR will only see a mark increase of around 5 marks. While larger changes do happen they are extremely rare.
Because of this, we would only recommend you submit an EAR if you are within 5 marks of the pass mark and are confident in their answers/submission.
2) How confident are you that your result is wrong?
There is no guarantee that your mark will change for the positive with an EAR. As well as remaining the same, your result could be decreased upon remarking. With this in mind, we do not recommend submitting an EAR simply to improve a pass mark. It’s also important to think about how you felt on the day of the assessment, how confident you felt when reviewing the questions and whether there are any other issues that might have affected your performance on the day:
- How well did you sleep the night before?
- Were there distractions around you while you were completing your assessment?
- Were there any other factors that might have affected your performance on the day - e.g. stress, sickness, dependents)?
- How much time did you devote to revision?
- Did you use all of the course content, resources and revision aids available to you?
- If there was a mock assessment available, did you complete it and did you receive feedback from your online tutor?
- Were there any questions or topics on the paper that you did not feel confident in, or took you by surprise?
If you are considering submitting an EAR for a risk assessment (NG2, IG2, FSC2, EMC2, DNI, NDEM2, IDEM2), there is an additional consideration - Are you confident that all “Not Met” marks are unjustified. A risk assessment will only move from Refer to Pass if all criteria receive a “Met”. This means that if just 1 “Not Met” remains after an EAR, your mark will remain as a Refer.
Submitting an Enquiry About Results (EAR) to NEBOSH
If you are still unhappy with your result and would like to challenge it with NEBOSH, you will need to submit an EAR to NEBOSH directly. There are 2 versions of the EAR:
- Enquiry Type 1: clerical check - This is a clerical check to ensure all parts of the assessment have been marked and that marks have been totalled correctly. The fee is £18 per unit and the outcome is provided within 10 working days.
NOTE: NEBOSH have a robust procedure for declaring results and to date, we’ve not seen any Type 1 EAR make a difference in a grade so we would not recommend this - but the option is available.
Please be aware, NEBOSH will only refund EAR fees if the outcome upgrades a refer to a pass.
You have 20 working days from the date your results were released to submit an EAR.
Booking a resit while awaiting an EAR outcome
You can book a resit while you’re waiting for the EAR outcome, in line with our registration deadlines. We would recommend you book a resit for the assessment date that follows the EAR outcome date. This means you will have the resit booked in the event your grade does not change. However, if your result is upgraded to a pass, and you have not submitted an assessment on the booked resit, RRC will refund the resit fee. Please note that if you do submit a resit before the EAR outcome, RRC cannot refund the fee regardless of the outcome.
You are welcome to wait for the EAR outcome and only book a resit later on, if necessary.
If you’re not sure what date to register for, please contact the Exams Team who will advise.
Diploma EAR and booking a resit
Due to the Diploma unit assessments only being held twice per year per unit, you might need to begin your resit assessment while awaiting your EAR outcome. Please rest assured that, as long as you have not submitted your new assessment, RRC will refund the resit in full if your EAR is successful.