GCSE Economics past papers, marked against the real criteria
AQA, Edexcel and OCR Economics papers with the mark scheme sitting beside every question. You write the answer in full; it is marked the way an examiner marks it, link by link, so you can see which step of your chain of reasoning took a mark and which one you skipped.
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What "marked against the criteria" actually means
Economics is marked on the steps between the cause and the effect, not on whether the effect you named is the right one. A four-mark question is four links, and an answer that knows where the story ends but steps over the middle collects a fraction of the marks. It is the most common way a pupil who understands the economics still comes out with half the paper.
Question. Explain how an increase in the Bank of England's Bank Rate could reduce the rate of inflation. (4 marks)
The answer most pupils give:
Two out of four, for an answer with nothing wrong in it. What is missing is the middle. An examiner marks a chain by walking it and stops where yours stops moving, so the marks go in the gap you jumped, not in anything visible on the page.
A smaller habit travels with it: the words in Economics are narrower than they look. Inflation falling does not mean prices falling — they are still rising, only more slowly — and an answer with the shops getting cheaper has described deflation. Demand and quantity demanded are not the same thing either.
Every diagram mark is something you drew, not something you meant
Most of the marks on a supply and demand diagram are for labels. Price on the vertical axis and quantity on the horizontal, both named; both curves named; the original equilibrium price and quantity carried out to the axes rather than left implied by where the lines cross. Then the shift: the right curve, in the right direction, drawn as a second curve with its own label beside the first rather than the first one rubbed out. Then the new equilibrium, carried out to the axes the same way.
That last step is the one that goes missing most. A pupil shifts demand to the right, sees the intersection move up and across, and treats the answer as given — but nothing states the new price or the new quantity, so the examiner has a shifted curve and no result.
The other common loss is shifting a curve for a change in the good's own price. If coffee gets dearer, the demand curve does not move; you move up along it. A shift comes from something else — income, tastes, the price of a substitute, the number of buyers. Drawing one there is not an imprecise answer, it is a different diagram, and it takes the written analysis with it.
"Evaluate" and "to what extent" want a decision
The longest question hands you a statement or a policy and asks you to evaluate it, or say how far you agree. It carries eight to twelve marks depending on the board and the paper, and it is banded on the whole answer rather than ticked point by point. GCSE Economics is untiered on all three boards, so every pupil sits the same paper and this question is where most of the grade range gets decided.
Covering both sides is the entry price, not the top band. Middle-band answers usually do it well: three arguments for a rise in the national minimum wage, three against, all developed. The top band wants a judgement on top — which side wins here, and what it hangs on. Two endings throw it away. One is "it depends on the situation", true of every question in economics and committing to nothing. The other is a conclusion the analysis was never pointing at.
A judgement in Economics is usually a conditional with the condition named. Not that a sugar tax is a good idea, but that a tax only cuts consumption if demand responds to price — and if, as is usually argued, demand for sugary drinks is fairly inelastic, it raises more revenue than it changes behaviour, so it is worth doing where that revenue goes to the health costs it was justified by. The elasticity is the reason, and the reason is what earns the mark.
The calculations, and the marks that are not arithmetic
Percentage change drives nearly every number on the paper: the change, divided by the original figure, times a hundred. Economic growth is the percentage change in real GDP, so an economy going from £480 billion to £492 billion grew by 12 ÷ 480 × 100 = 2.5%. Price elasticity of demand is one percentage change divided by another: bus fares up from £2.00 to £2.20 is a 10% rise, journeys down from 40,000 to 37,600 a week is a 6% fall, and 6 ÷ 10 gives 0.6 — below one, so demand is inelastic and weekly revenue rises from £80,000 to £82,720 on fewer passengers.
The marks that go missing there are not arithmetic. One is the unit: 2.5 is not an answer and 2.5% is. The other is the second half of the question, which is almost always there — state whether demand is elastic or inelastic, explain what the growth rate tells you. The number is one mark and what it means is the next, and an answer that stops at the figure has done the easy half.
That is what the marking here shows: which of the four links you wrote, and which one the examiner was waiting for.
The papers
| Board | Year | Paper | Tier | Questions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AQA | 2023 | Economics Paper 1: How Markets Work | practice | 6 |
| AQA | 2023 | Economics Paper 2: How the Economy Works | practice | 7 |
| AQA | 2024 | Economics Paper 1: How Markets Work | practice | 7 |
| AQA | 2024 | Economics Paper 2: How the Economy Works | practice | 7 |
| OCR | 2024 | Economics | practice | 8 |
35 questions across 5 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.
The other subjects
Twenty-three in one place, aligned to AQA, Edexcel and OCR.