GCSE Music past papers, marked against the real criteria

AQA, Edexcel and OCR listening and appraising papers with the mark scheme beside every question. You write the answer in full; it is marked the way an examiner marks it, device by device, including the terms that decide whether a right idea scores. The written paper is 40% of GCSE Music, and it is the part we can mark.

Open the papers, free, no card

What "marked against the criteria" actually means

Listening questions above a couple of marks are marked in pairs: one mark for naming the device, one for explaining what it does. An answer made of feelings collects neither, because the feeling is what the question already told you was there and asked you to account for.

The elements, and the words the scheme expects

Almost every listening answer is a translation job: you hear something and you give it its name. The elements are the headings to translate under, and a small vocabulary covers most of a paper.

Dynamics are pianissimo to fortissimo, crescendo and diminuendo, and terraced dynamics for the Baroque habit of switching between loud and soft in blocks rather than fading. Texture is monophonic, homophonic, polyphonic or contrapuntal, and the interlocking ostinati of gamelan and samba — "all the instruments play together" is not a texture. Metre turns on one question, whether the main beat splits into two or three, and then on syncopation and polyrhythm. Harmony is diatonic against chromatic, dissonance, a pedal note, cadences, and a ground bass — a short bass pattern repeated underneath while everything above it changes. Sonority is the instrument and how it is played: pizzicato, tremolo, muted brass, and in popular music the production itself — multi-tracking, panning, reverb, distortion.

Practise them against a mark scheme rather than a vocabulary list. Knowing the word ostinato is a different skill from producing it in the twenty seconds the extract gives you.

Two thirds of this GCSE is not a written paper

On AQA, Edexcel and OCR alike, the listening and appraising exam is 40% of the qualification. The other 60% is coursework: performing, solo and ensemble, and composing, one free composition and one to a brief set by the board, recorded across the two years and marked by your teacher against the board's criteria, then moderated by the board.

We do not mark a performance and we do not mark a composition. We cannot hear you play, and reading a description of a piece you wrote is not the same as assessing it. Those marks are won in the practice room, with a teacher who can hear you, and they are the larger half of the grade. What is here is the paper — the part left until last because it has no obvious homework.

One more limit. The real exam plays audio in the hall; a web page cannot, and recordings are in copyright. Every extract here is an original written description, answered as though it were playing. That trains the naming and the writing, where the marks go missing. It does not train the hearing, which needs recordings and whatever your own board has set.

Set works, unfamiliar music, and the comparison at the end

The boards disagree about what you are listening to. Edexcel sets an anthology of eight works studied in detail, among them Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, Beethoven's Pathétique sonata, Purcell's Music for a While and Queen's Killer Queen, and much of its paper asks about those pieces, so the detail must be remembered. AQA examines four areas of study, with unfamiliar extracts in one section and study pieces in the other. OCR sets no set works at all: everything you hear is music you have never met, and the skill is placing a tradition, a period or a technique from the evidence in front of you. So drilling a movement pays on Edexcel and is wasted on OCR, where what counts is having heard enough music to place an extract quickly.

All three end with an extended response of ten or twelve marks, marked in levels rather than by ticking points; on Edexcel it compares a set work with an unfamiliar piece. Wherever a question says compare, the failure is the one English has too: a paragraph about the first piece, a paragraph about the second, and the two never in the same sentence. Two accurate descriptions sit mid-band, because the criteria reward comparing — element by element, ending on a judgement rather than a summary.

The papers

44 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 Music

The other subjects

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