GCSE Geography past papers, marked against the real criteria

AQA, Edexcel and OCR Geography papers with the mark scheme sitting beside every question. You write the answer in full; it is marked the way an examiner marks it, against the place detail, the use of the figure and the judgement that separate a bottom-band answer from a top-band one.

Open the papers, free, no card

What "marked against the criteria" actually means

Geography is not marked on whether what you wrote is true. Most answers that score two out of six are entirely true. They are marked on whether the geography is anchored to a real place, and a case-study answer that could have been written about anywhere stays in the bottom band however accurate it is.

Why the named example and the real number are the marks

Every board builds its higher-tariff questions around an example the pupil supplies. The boards cannot print a case study, so what they test is whether you studied one. The wording differs between schemes, but the effect is the same everywhere — detail that could only be true of one place scores, and detail that could be true of any place does not.

Useful detail is smaller than most pupils think. Not "the Amazon", but the Trans-Amazonian Highway opening the forest interior to ranching. Not "coastal erosion in the UK", but the soft boulder clay cliffs of the Holderness coast in East Yorkshire and the sediment that travels south to build Spurn Head. One named place, one named process, one figure or date you are genuinely certain of. A number you half-remember is worse than no number, because an examiner who spots a wrong figure discounts the sentence it is sitting in.

Fieldwork, maps and the skills questions

There has been no Geography coursework since the current specifications; fieldwork is examined in a written paper instead. You carry out two enquiries in contrasting environments, normally one physical and one human, and the paper asks about your own — then about somebody else's, in an unfamiliar fieldwork context you have never visited.

The marks are not for what happened on the day. They are for the reasoning: why that site suited the question, why you sampled the way you did and what bias the method removed, whether the graph you chose was right for that data, and where the data is weak. "We used random sampling" is a description. "We used random sampling so that we did not unconsciously pick the tidiest stretch of the river" is an answer.

The map and graph questions are the most recoverable marks on the paper, because they are rules rather than knowledge. Grid references are read eastings first, then northings: along the corridor, then up the stairs. Four figures locate a one-kilometre square, six figures locate a hundred-metre square inside it. On a 1:50,000 map two centimetres is a kilometre; on a 1:25,000 map it is four. Contours bunched together mean a steep slope, and reading their values along a line is all a cross-section is. When a question says describe the distribution, it wants the overall pattern first, then a figure from the resource to support it, then the anomaly — not every value in the table read out in order. A choropleth map shades whole areas into bands, so it hides the variation inside each area and makes its borders look like real edges, and saying so is often the mark.

The extended answer, and the three boards

Each paper ends on a question carrying more marks than anything around it, marked by level rather than by ticking points: a band for the whole answer, with indicative content as a guide rather than a checklist. Whatever the command word — assess, evaluate, to what extent — the shape the top band rewards is the same. Two genuine sides, each supported by place detail, and a conclusion that decides, with a reason. An answer that describes both sides accurately and then stops has not judged anything, and that is the most common way a well-informed pupil lands a band below their knowledge.

These are also the questions where spelling, punctuation, grammar and specialist terminology carry marks of their own, on top of the tariff: writing "seismometer", "impermeable" or "dependency ratio" correctly and in the right place scores separately from the geography.

The board matters more in Geography than in most subjects. AQA runs one specification, with a nine-mark top tariff. Edexcel runs two, A and B, with different topic titles, an eight-mark standard extended question, and a decision-making paper built on a resource booklet released in advance. OCR also runs two, a themes-based suite and an enquiry-based one, with twelve-mark extended answers. The content overlaps heavily, because all of them follow the subject content published by the Department for Education, but the tariffs, the command words and the detail a scheme expects do not — which is why practising on your own board's papers is worth more than practising on more.

The papers

61 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 Geography

The other subjects

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