GCSE Food Preparation and Nutrition past papers, marked against the real criteria

AQA, OCR and Eduqas Food Preparation and Nutrition 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 temperatures and the exact food-science words that decide whether a right idea scores. The written paper is half the qualification, and it is the half we can mark.

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What "marked against the criteria" actually means

Most short answers on a Food paper are marked one mark per valid point, up to the tariff. Two things follow from that, and pupils lose marks to both. A number is often the mark itself, so the action without the figure scores nothing. And four sentences that make the same point in different words are one point, not four.

The same shape repeats all over the paper. "Cook it properly" is not a point; 75°C is. "Store it safely" is not a point; the bottom shelf is. That is not pedantry — in a kitchen the figure is the thing that keeps somebody out of hospital.

The food science wants the mechanism, and the right name for it

The science strand is where a describe answer gets written into an explain question. Sugar goes brown, the sauce goes thick, the egg goes solid: all true, all worth nothing, because the scheme is asking what happened to the molecules and what the change is called.

Heat a white sauce and the starch grains from the flour absorb the liquid and swell, then burst and release starch into the milk, which thickens it — that is gelatinisation, and it needs heat, liquid and stirring together. Heat egg white and the protein chains unravel, which is denaturation, and then bond to each other and set, which is coagulation; they are two stages with two names and schemes ask for both. Toast browns by dextrinisation, starch broken down by dry heat. A steak crust or a baked loaf browns by the Maillard reaction, which needs protein and sugar together, while caramelisation is sugar on its own breaking down at high temperature. Those last two are the pair most often swapped, and swapping them costs the mark even when the rest of the sentence is right.

Food safety is marked in numbers

This is the part of the specification with exact figures in it, and the figures are the answer. The danger zone, where harmful bacteria multiply fastest, is 5–63°C. A fridge belongs at 0–5°C and a freezer at −18°C or below, where bacteria go dormant rather than die. Food held hot for service must stay above 63°C. High-risk food is cooked to a core temperature of 75°C, taken in the thickest part with a probe, and the kill depends on time as well as heat — the Food Standards Agency treats 70°C held for two minutes and 75°C for thirty seconds as equivalent.

Around them sit the rules that carry the rest of the marks. Raw meat goes on the bottom shelf so nothing drips onto food that will not be cooked again. Raw chicken is not washed, because the splashes spread campylobacter around the sink. A use-by date is about safety, a best-before date is about quality. Cooked rice left standing warm is its own case: bacillus cereus spores survive the boiling, and the toxin they produce afterwards survives reheating too, which is why the answer is cooling it fast, not heating it again.

Half the grade is not on the paper, and we do not mark it

On AQA, OCR and Eduqas the written exam is worth half the GCSE. The other half is two non-exam assessments: a food investigation, which is a written report on a food-science question set by the board, worth around fifteen per cent; and a food preparation task, where you plan a menu, cook three dishes in a single session of about three hours and write it all up, worth around thirty-five per cent. The tasks are released in the autumn of Year 11 and are marked by your teacher against the board's criteria.

We mark the written paper. We do not mark practical work, and nothing here can tell you whether your sauce split or your presentation held up — that needs a teacher standing next to the bench. What does carry across is the investigation report, which is assessed on the same food science, in the same language: a report saying the bread rose better in the warm place scores like an exam answer saying the sauce got thicker.

The papers

30 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.

Open GCSE Food Preparation & Nutrition

The other subjects

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