GCSE Physics past papers, marked against the real criteria

AQA, Edexcel and OCR Physics papers with the mark scheme sitting beside every question. You write out the full working; it is marked the way an examiner marks it, stage by stage, including the substitution and conversion marks that disappear when the final number is nearly right.

Open the papers, free, no card

What "marked against the criteria" actually means

Physics marks a calculation in stages, so a pupil who reaches the wrong final number can still collect most of the marks — and a pupil who is one prefix away from the right answer can lose two. That asymmetry is the biggest single reason a pupil who understands the physics still drops marks. Here is a four-mark energy question in the style of AQA Paper 1.

The equations you are given, and the ones you have to recall

Every board prints an equation sheet in the exam, and it does not carry all the equations. Around twenty have to come out of your own head, and they are the short everyday ones: V = IR, P = VI, P = I²R, E = Pt, F = ma, kinetic energy = ½mv², density, charge, momentum, wave speed, efficiency. The sheet carries the longer ones — for AQA, the specific heat capacity equation used above and v² − u² = 2as are both on it. Check which list your own board puts each equation on: a recalled equation you cannot recall is worth nothing, and so is a printed one you never think to look up.

Knowing the equation is itself a mark. Papers ask for it outright — write down the equation linking efficiency, useful output and total input, one mark — and on a longer calculation the first mark is usually for substituting into the right equation, which survives every arithmetic slip after it. The corollary is blunter than pupils expect: a correct final answer normally takes every mark with or without working, and a wrong final answer with no working takes none at all. You cannot tell which of the two you have written until the results arrive, so the working is not neatness, it is insurance.

Units, prefixes and significant figures

The unit is usually printed on the answer line already, which persuades people that units are not marked. They are marked, just not there: the mark is for the number being expressed in the unit that is printed, which is what the kettle question turns on. Where a question asks you to give the unit yourself, that is a separate mark.

Standard form causes its own losses. Subtracting two nearly equal numbers — the mass of four protons and the mass of the helium nucleus they fuse into, say — only works if the subtraction is done first and the power of ten kept intact; dividing one by the other and reading off 99 per cent describes the mass that remained, not the mass that was converted. Then rounding: do it at the end, never in the middle. Schemes generally accept an answer carried to more figures than asked for, but not one rounded early and therefore wrong in its last digit. And where the question specifies two significant figures, that is an instruction rather than a suggestion.

The required practicals, and the six-mark method question

Each board names a list of practicals every pupil must have carried out — specific heat capacity, the resistance of a wire, density, waves in a ripple tank, refraction through a glass block, acceleration, force and extension. None are assessed in a laboratory. They are assessed in the written papers, often as a method question worth up to six marks: describe how the student obtained these results.

Those are marked by level rather than by ticking points. The top band asks whether the method, followed exactly as written, would actually produce a valid result, and whether the steps are in a workable order. For the refraction practical that means drawing round the block, marking the ray going in and the ray coming out, joining them through the block, drawing the normal at 90° to the surface, measuring both angles from the normal, and repeating over a range of angles of incidence. It also means a method built on reflection instead of refraction scores zero however well written, because it describes a different experiment.

Most pupils meet all of this as one third of Combined Science and come out with two grades across the three sciences; a smaller number sit Triple and get a separate Physics grade, with extra content behind it including space. The marking is identical either way, and the Foundation tier caps the grade however good the answers are — at 5 on a separate paper, and at 5–5 on Combined Science, which is graded on a seventeen-point paired scale from 1–1 to 9–9. The three boards examine nearly the same physics, because all three follow the subject content published by the Department for Education. What differs is the command words and how much detail a scheme wants before it accepts an answer — which is why practising on your own board's papers is worth more than practising on more papers.

The papers

19 questions across 6 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 Physics

The other subjects

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