GCSE Biology past papers, marked against the real criteria

AQA, Edexcel and OCR Biology papers with the mark scheme sitting beside every question. You write the answer in full; it is marked the way an examiner marks it, point by point, including the qualifying words that decide whether a right idea scores or not.

Open the papers, free, no card

What "marked against the criteria" actually means

Biology punishes vague answers harder than almost any other subject, because the mark scheme is a list of specific words and an answer either contains them or does not. This is the single most common way a pupil who knows the material still loses the mark.

The same shape repeats across the paper. Osmosis is not "water moving", it is water moving through a partially permeable membrane, down a concentration gradient. Enzymes are not "destroyed" by heat, they are denatured, and the active site changes shape. Each of those qualifiers is a mark somebody did not get.

Combined Science and Triple, and the three boards

Most pupils sit Biology as one third of Combined Science and come out with two grades across the three sciences; a smaller number sit Triple and get a separate Biology grade. The Triple papers carry extra content and more of the harder questions, but the marking works identically, and Foundation tier caps the grade however good the answers are — at 5 on a separate Biology paper, and at 5–5 on Combined Science, which is graded on a seventeen-point paired scale from 1–1 to 9–9.

AQA, Edexcel and OCR examine almost the same content, because all three follow the subject content published by the Department for Education. What differs is the command words, how many marks a six-mark question is split into, and how much detail the scheme expects before it accepts an answer — which is why practising on your own board's papers is worth more than practising on more papers.

Where the marks actually go

Three places, and pupils lose them in this order.

Qualifying words. As above: the idea is there and the specifying word is not. This is most of the one-mark losses on a Biology paper.

The command word. "Describe" wants what happens. "Explain" wants why it happens, and an answer that only describes scores nothing on an explain question however accurate it is. "Suggest" wants you to apply something you know to a situation you have not met, and marks are available for a sensible wrong answer that is properly reasoned.

The six-mark question. These are marked by level, not by ticking points: a band for the quality and coherence of the whole answer, with indicative content as a guide rather than a checklist. Writing six disconnected true sentences lands in the bottom band. Writing four connected ones, in order, with the biology linked to the context in the question, lands in the top one.

The practical consequence is the one nobody believes until they see it on their own answer: knowing the biology is roughly half the job, and saying it in the scheme's terms is the other half.

The required practicals

Every board examines the required practicals in the written papers — the osmosis potato investigation, food tests, the effect of light on photosynthesis, enzyme and pH, microbiology plates. The questions ask about the method, the variables and the anomalies rather than the result, because the result is in the textbook and the method is what tells an examiner you did it. Those questions are in the papers here with the same marking.

The papers

51 questions across 7 papers, each with its own criteria. Everything here is written in the boards' own format and judged against their published criteria; the papers themselves belong to the boards and are not reproduced here.

Try it on your own answer

Open a paper, write what you would have written in the exam, including the wrong bits, and read what comes back. It is free to start and does not ask for a card.

Open GCSE Biology

The other subjects

Twenty-three in one place, aligned to AQA, Edexcel and OCR.