GCSE Design and Technology past papers, marked against the real criteria

AQA, Edexcel and OCR Design and Technology written papers with the mark scheme sitting beside every question. You write the answer in full; it is marked the way an examiner marks it, mark by mark, including the development marks that a correctly named property never earns on its own.

Open the papers, free, no card

What "marked against the criteria" actually means

Marks on a Design and Technology paper come in pairs. One is for naming the right thing — a property, a process, a material. The other is for saying what it does in the product in front of you. Pupils take the first almost every time and lose the second almost every time, because naming the property feels like having answered.

The same shape repeats down the paper. "Aluminium is corrosion resistant" takes the first mark; "so the scooter frame survives road spray without rusting" takes the second. And the thing you name has to be a property: "pine is a softwood" and "ABS is a thermoplastic" are classifications, true and not what was asked for.

Half of this GCSE is the design and make task, and that is not what we mark

Worth being plain about first. On AQA, Edexcel and OCR alike, the written paper is half the qualification. The other half is the non-exam assessment — the design and make task, which OCR calls the Iterative Design Challenge: a contextual challenge released by the board, worked over months, producing a portfolio and a prototype that your teacher marks and the board moderates.

We do not mark that, and we should not. We never see your folder or the thing you made, and no automatic marker deserves a levels judgement on a prototype it has not handled. What is here is the written paper. If the marks going missing are in your NEA, your teacher is the person for that, and it is the right half to spend the time on.

That paper covers three bodies of content on every board. Core technical principles are what everyone sits whatever they make in: new and emerging technologies, energy, smart and modern materials, mechanical devices, the categories of material. Specialist technical principles go deeper into your own material area — timbers, metals, polymers, papers and boards, textiles or electronic systems — and that is where general answers stop scoring and the named process is wanted. Designing and making principles bring the longest questions: specifications, ergonomics and anthropometrics, scales of production, quality control, and the extended responses that ask you to analyse or evaluate.

The calculations are the most reliably winnable marks on the paper

Every paper carries maths, those marks do not depend on how well you write, and the methods are short. Gear and pulley ratios divide the driven by the driver. A 15-tooth driver meshed with a 45-tooth driven gear gives 45 ÷ 15 = 3, a ratio of 3:1, so a driver turning at 600 rpm drives the second gear at 600 ÷ 3 = 200 rpm, with roughly three times the torque, in the opposite direction. Mechanical advantage on a lever is the effort arm divided by the load arm: 1200 mm from a wheelbarrow's axle to its handles against 400 mm to the load gives 3, so a 300 N load needs 300 ÷ 3 = 100 N at the handles.

What goes missing there is almost never arithmetic. One mark is the unit: 200 is not an answer and 200 rpm is, while a gear ratio of 3:1 carries no unit at all. One is the sentence asked for after the number — what the ratio means for the machine, which here is slower and stronger. And one is the working: a method mark survives a wrong figure, and a wrong figure carried forward correctly still earns what comes after it.

The six Rs are applied, not listed

Refuse, reduce, reuse, repair, recycle, rethink. They take ten seconds to learn and they are among the most reliably wasted marks on the paper, because the question is almost never "what are the six Rs". It gives you a product and asks how a designer could reduce its environmental impact, and the marks are for doing that to that product.

All six listed and correctly spelled is a list. Repair applied to the cordless drill above is a different object: the battery pack is held in with screws rather than bonded, and sold separately as a spare, so a worn set of cells does not end the life of a working tool. One R, one product, one decision a designer made, and it outscores the other five recited. Life-cycle assessment works the same way, with the marks on the stage you name.

That is what the marking here shows: not a model answer, but which of the four marks your own sentence earned, and which sentence was meant to earn the rest.

The papers

43 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 Design & Technology

The other subjects

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