Getting more out of these papers than a score

Every paper on this page is free, from every major board, with mark schemes and video walkthroughs. The papers are not the hard part though. What separates a student who improves from one who just accumulates scores is what happens in the twenty minutes after the paper is finished.

The three boards are not interchangeable

All three run three ninety minute papers with equal weighting and no coursework, and all three overlap at grades 4 and 5 between Foundation and Higher. The differences that matter in practice are OCR's 100 mark papers, OCR putting the non-calculator paper in the middle, and Edexcel's heavier use of wrapped-up problem solving.

Use your child's own board for the bulk of practice. Once those run low, other boards are perfectly good extra material for a specific topic, as long as you are not treating the timing or the score as comparable.

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.

Turning a marked paper into next week's revision

A marked paper should produce a list, not a feeling. Write down every topic that lost a mark, then cross off anything from the "knew it, lost it anyway" pile, because those need exam technique rather than reteaching.

What is left is the actual revision list, and it is usually much shorter and much more specific than the vague sense of being behind that the student walked in with. Three named topics is a week's work. "I'm bad at maths" is not a plan.

If a topic keeps reappearing, it is a foundation problem rather than a revision problem, and re-reading notes will not shift it. Our interactive mastery lessons start at the genuinely basic version of a topic and step up in tiers, which is the fastest way we know to close a gap without a student having to sit through content they already have.

Questions parents ask

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