GCSE English past papers, marked against the real criteria

AQA, Edexcel and OCR papers for both English Language and English Literature, with the marking criteria beside every question. You write the answer in full; it is placed in a band the way an examiner places it, with the reason it sits there and what would move it up.

Open the papers, free, no card

What "marked against the criteria" actually means

English is not marked by ticking points off a list. Almost every question worth more than a few marks is marked by band: the examiner reads the whole answer, decides which of the band descriptions it best fits, and places it there. Which is why an answer can contain nothing wrong at all and still sit near the bottom of the scale: nothing in it is incorrect, and nothing in it is analysis.

A question in the style of AQA Language Paper 1. The line below is original: the real paper uses an unseen copyrighted extract, so the papers here use original passages in the same style.

The habit that costs the marks has a name: quote and explain. Name the device, restate what the line means, add a sentence about the reader imagining something. It has the shape of analysis, which is why nobody corrects it, and it is why pupils who understand the text perfectly well sit mid-band.

The assessment objectives, and what each rewards

AO1 is understanding: finding information, choosing the right evidence, and in Literature holding one argument across an essay with short embedded quotations.

AO2 is methods — what the writer did and what it does, in language, structure and form. It is the largest block of reading marks on the Language papers, and where Literature essays most often stop halfway.

AO3 means different things in the two subjects. In Literature it is context: marks for ideas that illuminate the text, not for a paragraph of history bolted on at the end. In Language it is the comparison of two writers' viewpoints on Paper 2, where the marks are for comparing, not for describing each source in turn.

AO4 in Language is critical evaluation: the long question that hands you an opinion about the text and asks how far you agree. Agreeing politely is not evaluation; the criteria want a judgement you have argued for, and disagreeing well scores as highly. In Literature, AO4 is something else entirely — spelling, punctuation and grammar, four marks on one question per paper on AQA.

AO5 and AO6 are your own writing. On each AQA Language paper, forty of the eighty marks are Section B and sixteen of those are technical accuracy alone: a fifth of the qualification is punctuation, sentence variety, spelling and Standard English.

Closed book, and what it changes

You do not take the texts into the Literature exam. AQA prints a short extract for the Shakespeare and 19th-century novel questions, and the named poem for the anthology comparison; the modern text, the poem you compare it with and everything else comes out of memory. Other boards arrange extracts differently.

So quotations have to be short enough to recall exactly, which is what the criteria reward anyway: three words inside your own sentence beat a copied-out paragraph that occupies the space the analysis needed. And you cannot hunt for evidence in the exam, so it is chosen months earlier and grouped by theme rather than by chapter, picked because there is something in it to analyse.

It is also why the Literature papers here give the question and not the text. Set texts are in copyright, and closed book means the practice worth doing is writing the essay from memory.

Language Paper 1 and Paper 2 are not the same exam

Paper 1 is one fiction source and four reading questions climbing from listing four things, through language, through structure, to a long evaluation, then a descriptive or narrative piece of your own. Paper 2 is two non-fiction sources, one usually from the 19th century, and asks for different work: summarise the differences, analyse one, compare both writers' viewpoints and methods. Its writing task is an argument: an article, a letter, a speech.

The traps there are structural. People analyse language on the summary question, where analysis scores nothing. They write about source A, then source B, and never put the two together, so a well-written pair of halves sits low on a question whose objective is comparison. And they answer the Paper 1 structure question with word choice again, when the marks are for how the text is organised — where your attention is sent at the opening, where and why the focus shifts, how the ending answers the beginning.

The boards differ in the detail — Edexcel's Paper 1 sets 19th-century fiction and asks for language and structure in one question, OCR splits its reading between a non-fiction paper and a literary one — which is why your own board's papers are worth more than more papers.

The papers

31 questions across 8 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 English

The other subjects

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