AQA Exam Papers
Past Papers
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How to actually use these AQA maths papers
AQA GCSE Maths is specification 8300. Three papers, ninety minutes each, eighty marks each, and the whole grade decided across 240 marks with no coursework anywhere. Downloading the papers is the easy part. What follows is how to get a grade out of them.
What the three AQA papers actually are
| Paper | Calculator | Time | Marks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paper 1 | No | 1h 30m | 80 |
| Paper 2 | Yes | 1h 30m | 80 |
| Paper 3 | Yes | 1h 30m | 80 |
Each paper is worth exactly a third. There is no weighting trick and no paper that matters more, which means a bad Paper 1 is genuinely recoverable and worth saying out loud to a student who has just come out of one.
Foundation tier covers grades 1 to 5. Higher covers 4 to 9. The overlap at grades 4 and 5 is where most tier decisions get argued about, and the honest test is whether your child can reliably reach the grade 4 and 5 content on Higher without the harder questions eating the time they need for it.
Where AQA marks are usually lost
Across the papers we mark, the same clusters come up. On Foundation it is fractions, percentages of amounts, ratio sharing and rearranging simple formulae. On Higher it is surds, algebraic fractions, circle theorems, and the multi-step ratio and proportion questions that look like arithmetic and are not.
AQA is also consistent about wording. Questions that say show that want the working to arrive at the stated answer, and a correct answer with no route to it scores nothing. Questions that say give a reason need a sentence, not a number. Free marks go missing there every year.
How to mark a paper without flattering yourself
The mark scheme is the most valuable half of the download and the half most students never open. Marks come in three kinds and knowing which one you dropped tells you what to fix.
- M marks are for method. You get them for a correct approach even when the arithmetic goes wrong later. If you are losing these, the problem is that you do not know the method.
- A marks are for accuracy and depend on the M mark above them. Losing A marks while keeping M marks means the method is fine and the execution is not, which is a very different fix.
- B marks stand alone. Either the answer is there or it is not.
Mark strictly. The single most common self-marking error is awarding a mark for an answer that is nearly right, which quietly inflates every practice score and hides the gap until results day. If your child cannot mark their own work honestly, that is normal at 15, and it is the main reason our mock marking service exists.
Then sort every lost mark into one of two piles: did not know it and knew it, lost it anyway. The first pile is a teaching problem and needs the topic retaught. The second is an exam technique problem and needs different practice entirely. Most students have far more in the second pile than they expect.
Do not start with a timer
Going straight to full timed papers is the standard mistake. It produces a low score, the low score confirms what an anxious student already believes, and the paper gets avoided from then on.
Work in three passes instead. First pass untimed with notes open, aiming only to understand. Second pass untimed with notes closed. Third pass under exam timing. Do not move to timed work until the untimed version feels boring. By then the topic already carries a positive association and the clock is just a clock.
Little and often beats a full paper on a Sunday afternoon. Two questions a day, marked properly, will move a grade faster than one paper a fortnight that never gets marked at all.
Questions parents ask
How many past papers should my child do?
Quality beats quantity by a wide margin. Six papers worked through properly, marked against the scheme and with every lost mark followed up, will do more than twenty papers sat and filed away.
A reasonable rhythm from January of Year 11 is one paper a fortnight sat properly, plus two or three individual questions on weak topics most days.
Should we start with the oldest papers or the newest?
Save the two most recent series. Those are the closest thing to the real thing and they are worth more as a genuine dress rehearsal in April than as practice in November.
Work forward from the older papers first, and keep the newest ones sealed.
The grade boundaries look different every year. Which do we use?
Boundaries move because paper difficulty moves. A harder paper gets lower boundaries, which is the point of them.
Use the boundaries published for that specific paper, not last year's. Our grade boundary tool holds the real published figures so you can convert a raw mark to a grade without guessing.
My child understands it in the lesson and still fails the test. Why?
Recognising a method when someone has just shown it to you is a different skill from retrieving it cold with no cue. Most revision practises the first and almost none practises the second.
We wrote about this in detail for fractions and algebra, and the fix is the same for every topic.
Is AQA easier than Edexcel or OCR?
Not meaningfully, and the boundaries adjust for whatever difference exists in a given year. AQA papers tend to be a little more predictable in structure, which suits students who like knowing what is coming.
You do not usually get a choice anyway. The school picks the board. Our comparison of AQA, Edexcel and OCR goes into where the differences actually sit.