CREST Gold allows students to conduct real research. These 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 project work and present the outcomes of their project to their CREST assessor.
At the end of the project, students will need to create a project work 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 work:
Make sure the work has enough detail to show evidence that the project meets the criteria. This is especially important with PowerPoints and videos.
Number the pages if submitting a report. This will help students reference areas of the report when they fill out the checklist in their profile form.
Students should use their 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 their work.
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.
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 project work 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 project. 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 our CREST assessor has confirmed that you have achieved your CREST Award your certificate will be added to our next order.
CREST Silver stretches students and enriches their studies. Typically completed by students aged 14+, projects require around thirty hours of work and lead to a body of work. This work could be a written report, video diaries or something else ...
To sign up for Silver and Gold projects go to apply.crestawards.org and create an account. Creating a project can be done by a student or educator, or by an organisation. Once you have activated your account, log in and you will be taken to this ...
A common issue are projects being submitted with the incorrect attachments included. A project submission (e.g. GO-0000000001) needs to have: 1x Project Work 1x or more student profile forms. This is based on the number of students entered on the ...
Star, SuperStar and Discovery You do not need to upload any work for Star, SuperStar or Discovery Awards. Bronze For Bronze, we ask for a sample of work from 10% of your students. E.g. if you have 10 students or less, upload 1 student's work, if you ...
To create a Discovery project you must register on apply.crestawards.org Creating projects in your CREST account If you’re using your CREST account to enter students for CREST Awards, this page explains how to get started. To create a project for ...