CREST Gold allows students to conduct real research. They are longer-term projects that require around 70 hours’ work, and are typically completed by 16-to-19-year-olds. By working towards a CREST Gold Award, students will develop and deliver largely self-directed projects.  

The aim is for students’ work to contribute something new to the scientific or technological community or to a particular field of study.  They can be supported by an industry or higher education mentor, who can offer guidance and advice, and are required to prepare a final report and present the outcomes of their project to their CREST assessor.

Tips for project work

Familiarise yourself with the CREST criteria and what's expected at Gold level.

At the end of the project, students will need to create a report to introduce, describe and evaluate their work. This could be in written report format, a PowerPoint, video or a series of blog posts for example.

Tips to help your students create a CREST project report:

1. Number the pages in the report. This will help students reference areas of the report when they fill out the checklist in their profile form.
   

1. Students should use your own words. We want to hear about their project and what they did. Don’t let students use information copied straight from the internet in the report.
   

1. Make sure they list the sources of research information. We don’t mind what format references are in, so long as we can find any sources they used. You might need to help students with this.

How assessment works

When your students have completed their project, you need to submit their work for assessment. An assessor will assess the work against the CREST criteria. 

If they feel that the work doesn’t meet the criteria, they will provide feedback on what the students need to do to achieve their Awards. You have the option to submit the project again for assessment. We charge £5 per submission for reassessment.

Alternatively, the assessor may offer to award a lower CREST level. In this case you can decide to accept the offered award, or work on the project further and resubmit it. 

Awards are awarded at the project level, so either the whole group achieves the award, or none of them achieve it.

Submitting work for assessment

When submitting your students’ work, you should include a report for the whole project, as well as a CREST Gold student profile form completed by each student taking an Award. You can download a profile form template from apply.crestawards.org.

The profile form includes a checklist to help the student show the assessor how they met the criteria in their report. There’s also a section for personal reflection on how the project went and how they might do things differently in the future. 

You need to complete the step Upload your work to submit the files for assessment. 

Please do not include any personal details other than your name. If you include a photo make sure you have the appropriate permissions from everyone included in the photo.

Once you've uploaded all the files and completed the other applications steps, you can proceed to payment. Please note that  completing the payment process will submit your project (pending payment) and you will not be able to make any edits to your submission after this.  We will assess the project once you have paid the entry fee.

Refer to our article on Uploading your students’ work for tips on handling physical documents, and on zipping files for easy transfer.

Receiving your certificates

Once your assessor has confirmed that you have achieved your CREST Award your certificate will be added to our next order.

View our Educator’s Guide for Gold

Have questions about your assessment? Contact CREST Support.