Dive into a treasure trove of IGCSE and IAL past papers

Both International GCSE and International A Level, across 24 subjects — sciences, mathematics, business and economics, humanities and languages — covering 457 exam sittings.

Papers from the current specification and the one before it are both kept. Older papers are still worth working through: the subject content has mostly not changed, and an extra ten papers to practise on is worth more than a perfectly tidy archive. Each paper is labelled with its specification code, so you can always see which generation you are looking at.

Type the code. Most students arrive knowing exactly which paper they need — their teacher has written 4PH1/1P or WEC12 on the board — and the search box takes codes directly. You do not need the subject name, the year or the session.

If you would rather browse, start from IGCSE or IAL, pick your subject, and you get every sitting we hold listed newest first. Each sitting opens to a table of units, with the question paper and its mark scheme side by side.

Nothing asks you to sign in, wait, or watch anything before the file opens.

Because a past paper without its mark scheme teaches you very little. You can tell whether an answer felt right; you cannot tell whether it would have earned the marks. Those are different things, and the gap between them is where grades are lost.

Marks are awarded for specific points, often for a particular word. Students who mark their own work generously and students who mark it against the official scheme end up with very different ideas of how ready they are — and only one of them is correct on results day.

So the scheme sits on the same page as the paper, always. Searches for mark schemes are roughly a third of all the searching that happens on this site, which tells you how much students want them.

A grade boundary is the mark you need for a particular grade on a particular paper. It is set after the exam has been sat, once the board can see how students actually performed, and it moves every session.

That is deliberate. No two papers are exactly equal in difficulty, so a fixed percentage would punish whoever happened to sit the harder one. Instead the boundary moves and the grade keeps its meaning. In practice this means a mark of 60% has been an A in one session and a B in another, in the same subject.

The calculator on this site uses the real published boundaries rather than a rule of thumb, and tells you how many marks separate you from the next grade up — which is the number worth revising against.

Because the hardest part of revision is not the work, it is deciding what to do today. Opening a list of two thousand papers at eight in the evening is how an hour disappears before anything gets done.

A printed tracker on the wall answers that question in advance. You can see which subjects have had attention this week and which have quietly had none — which is almost always the subject you find hardest, because avoidance is easier to do than to notice.

They are free to download and print, and there is nothing to sign up for. If you would rather have them bound, the printing service will do that.

Working in fixed stretches with real breaks, rather than a vague evening of "revising" with a phone nearby. Twenty-five minutes of genuine attention followed by five minutes away from the desk gets more done than two distracted hours, and it is far easier to start.

The timer here is built for exam practice specifically: it sits beside the paper you are working on, so a timed attempt stays timed. Most students overestimate how long they have in the exam and underestimate how long a question takes them — practising against a clock is the only way to find that out before it matters.

It needs no account and runs entirely in your browser.

It remembers your revision so you do not have to. Your subjects, your exam dates, which papers you have done, what you scored, and how that compares with the grade you are aiming for — in one place instead of across a notebook, a spreadsheet and your memory.

The value is not the list. It is being able to see, in one glance, that you have done every paper for the subject you enjoy and none for the subject you are worried about. That is a decision you can act on tonight.

It is free, it takes about twenty seconds to set up, and nothing you record in it is visible to anyone else.

There is no catch, and there is no account needed to read or download any paper. No watermark, no download limit, no countdown page, and nothing that asks for an email address before it hands over a file.

The site is paid for by modest advertising, a small printing service for students who want notes printed and bound, and an optional subscription for extra study tools. None of those touch the papers. If you never click an advertisement, never order anything and never subscribe, nothing about the site changes for you.

Past papers are published for students to learn from. Charging for them would be the opposite of the point.