GCSE Psychology past papers, marked against the real criteria
AQA, Edexcel and OCR Psychology papers with the mark scheme sitting beside every question. You write the answer in full; it is marked the way an examiner marks it, mark by mark, including the application and evaluation marks a well-remembered study never earns on its own.
Open the papers, free, no card
What "marked against the criteria" actually means
Psychology is where revision and marks come apart fastest. A pupil learns the studies, can recite Milgram and Asch and Beck, and still loses half the paper, because most questions do not ask for the study. They ask what it lets you say about the person in the scenario, or what follows from a flaw you have spotted. Writing the study instead is the commonest way a prepared pupil scores badly.
Question. Tom has joined a new football club. After training the players vote on the colour of the new kit. Tom privately prefers navy, but when all eight of the others say red, he raises his hand for red. Using your knowledge of social influence, explain Tom's behaviour in the vote. (4 marks)
The answer most pupils give:
One out of four, for four sentences of accurate psychology, none of them wrong. They answer "describe Asch's study", a question worth marks on the day it is asked. Boards split these four marks slightly differently, but all of them reserve most of an application question for the application.
Describe and evaluate are two different questions
Every board's longest item asks for both, usually for nine marks, and marks it by level rather than by ticking points — a band for the whole answer, the listed content a guide not a checklist. Pupils write the describe half well, because that half is revision. The evaluation half is where the bands separate.
The failure is an evaluation that states a fact and stops. "The sample was small." "Only men took part." Both are true of Milgram (1963), whose forty participants were all American men, and neither is worth a mark on its own, because the examiner is marking the consequence, not the observation. That sample is a problem because it gives no basis for saying women, or people outside the United States, would obey in the same proportions: the 65 per cent who went to 450 volts is a finding about that group, offered as a finding about people. Write the "because" and the mark is there.
Ethics needs the same handling: deception, absent informed consent and real distress are worth saying, alongside the debrief and the fact that most of those participants later said they were glad to have taken part. A one-sided evaluation is capped by the bands whichever side it takes, and the top band wants a judgement that follows from the argument, not a last line saying it depends.
Naming a study means who, when, and what it actually found
Psychology gives credit for detail other subjects would call trivia, and takes it away for detail that is wrong. "A study showed that people conform" is worth less than "Asch (1951) found conformity fell sharply when a single confederate dissented"; and an answer crediting the negative triad to Ellis has said something false about the subject. The triad — negative views of the self, the world and the future — is Beck (1967). The ABC model, in which an Activating event meets a Belief that may be rational or irrational and produces the emotional Consequence, is Ellis (1962). Both are cognitive explanations of depression and they are not the same model.
So if you are sure of the finding and unsure of the name, describe the study instead: "research using an artificial line-judgement task found that…" earns the point that a wrong attribution destroys.
Operationalising a variable, and the maths on the paper
Research methods runs through all three specifications and is the part of the course with right and wrong answers. The recurring one-mark loss is operationalisation. A variable named is not a variable operationalised: "tiredness" is a concept, "tested after two hours awake against after eighteen hours awake" is something another researcher could repeat. The same for the dependent variable — "concentration" is not measurable, "comprehension questions answered correctly out of ten" is. Design and ethics questions are built the same way: the choice named, then the reason for it — independent groups because it avoids order effects, consent because the participants are under sixteen.
The Department for Education requires at least a tenth of the marks on a GCSE Psychology paper to assess mathematical skills, so the arithmetic is not optional, and not hard: mean, median, mode and range, percentages, and reading a bar chart or scatter graph. Show the working — a method mark survives a wrong figure — and give the unit: 285 is not an answer to a question about reaction times, 285 ms is.
Psychology is untiered on all three boards, so every pupil sits the same paper. That is what the marking here shows: not a model answer to compare yourself against, but which of your own four marks were earned, and which sentence was meant to earn the ones that were not.
The papers
| Board | Year | Paper | Tier | Questions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AQA | 2022 | Psychology: Development | practice | 7 |
| AQA | 2023 | Psychology: Social Influence | practice | 7 |
| AQA | 2024 | Psychology: Memory | practice | 7 |
| Edexcel | 2023 | Psychology: Criminal Psychology | practice | 6 |
| Edexcel | 2024 | Psychology: The Brain & Neuropsychology | practice | 7 |
| OCR | 2023 | Psychology: Psychological Problems | practice | 7 |
| OCR | 2024 | Psychology: Research Methods & Statistics | practice | 8 |
49 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.
The other subjects
Twenty-three in one place, aligned to AQA, Edexcel and OCR.