GCSE Drama past papers, marked against the real criteria

AQA, Edexcel and OCR written Drama papers with the level criteria beside every question. You answer as the performer, designer or director the question names, and it is marked the way an examiner marks it: the band it sits in, and what would lift it. The written paper is forty per cent of the grade; the rest is devising and performance, which we do not mark.

Open the papers, free, no card

What "marked against the criteria" actually means

Drama is marked by level, and the level descriptions turn on one distinction: a choice the audience can see or hear, against a feeling the character has. Pupils who are good at Drama lose marks here more than anywhere else, because describing a character's inner life feels like the insightful answer.

The scenario below is invented for this page. Set plays are in copyright, so the papers here use original extracts in the same style; the real exam sets your own text.

The schemes reward a chain of three links: intention, method (the named skill, at a named point in the extract) and effect on the audience. Most answers give the first and the third and drop the middle one, which is the only link that is actually Drama.

Performer, designer or director: the question tells you which

Every extract question names a role, and the role decides which vocabulary scores. Answering a lighting design question with how the actor delivers the line earns nothing, however good the point.

As a performer you write about your own voice and body, in the first person, moment by moment. As a designer you write about what the audience looks at or listens to: the angle and intensity of a lighting state, a steel-blue gel rather than a warm amber, a gobo breaking the light into window bars, the fabric of a costume, the source and level of a sound. As a director you write about the stage picture: levels, proxemics, blocking, who holds the strongest position and who controls the distance between two bodies.

That vocabulary is small enough to learn in an evening and it decides the band. "Sad music" says nothing; a single low note at the edge of audibility is a choice with an effect. Practitioners work the same way: Stanislavski's given circumstances build a performance from the inside out, while Brecht's epic theatre breaks the illusion on purpose so the audience judges rather than weeps. Naming one scores nothing; using it to justify a choice does.

The live theatre question, which cannot be revised from a book

Every board ends the written paper with an evaluation of a production you have actually been to — two fifths of the AQA paper, a quarter of Edexcel's. Pupils walk into it cold, because there is nothing to revise unless you made notes on the night.

Two failures cost most of the marks. The first is retelling the plot, which is description where the criteria want judgement. The second is writing about the whole production rather than one moment: the top bands want precise recall, and precise recall of a three-hour show is impossible while precise recall of ninety seconds is not. So the answer takes one moment, names what the performer or designer did, says what it did to the audience, and reaches a judgement. Arguing that it did not work scores as highly.

The useful work happens before the exam: after seeing anything, write down four or five moments with the detail attached — the colour, the angle the light came from, the length of a held silence.

The written paper is forty per cent, and the rest happens in a room

This is the largest fact about the qualification. On all three boards the written paper is forty per cent. The other sixty per cent is practical: a devised piece with a portfolio documenting how it was made, and a performance of extracts from a text, assessed by your teacher and moderated by the board.

We do not mark performance. Nothing here can watch you act, score your devising, or tell you whether a piece works on its feet; that is your teacher's job and it cannot be done through a screen. What is here is the written paper: the extract questions answered in role, the terminology, the live theatre evaluation, marked against the level criteria.

The overlap is worth knowing, though. The devising portfolio is written in the same vocabulary as the extract questions and marked on the same habit, and the written paper is the cheapest place to learn it — there you can be shown, on your own sentence, which half an examiner could not credit.

The papers

41 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 Drama

The other subjects

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