How to use A Level Maths past papers
Past papers are the best practice you have, but only if you use them properly. Here is a simple plan that turns them into marks.
Where to find them
Your exam board publishes past papers, mark schemes and examiner reports for free:
- AQA (A Level Maths code 7357, Further Maths 7367)
- Pearson Edexcel (9MA0, Further Maths 9FM0)
- OCR (OCR A: H240 and H245, OCR B (MEI): H640 and H645)
Not sure which board you're doing? Ask your teacher, or look for the code on the front of a mock paper.
The newest papers come out late. Pearson only lets teachers see papers from the last 12 months, and AQA, for example, only made its June 2025 GCSE papers public in July 2026. Your teacher may have the latest ones, but schools often save them for mocks.
Other boards count too
Since 2017 all boards teach the same A Level Maths content, set by the Department for Education. So when you run out of your own board's papers, the other boards' papers are great extra practice. The style is a little different, but the maths is the same.
Older papers from before 2017 (with names like C1 to C4, S1 and M1) are still useful for pure maths practice. Just remember they cover a slightly different set of topics and their questions are more step by step, so use them as extra practice, not as a guide to what your exam looks like.
When to start
- While you learn each topic: do past paper questions on that topic straight away. Many revision sites sort past paper questions by topic, which makes this easy.
- From about February of Year 13: start full papers, around one a week, then more in the last six weeks.
- Save the newest two or three papers you can get. Keep them unseen for the last few weeks so they work as real mocks.
How to sit a paper
- Timed and in one go. A Level Maths papers are 2 hours each, and most are out of 100 marks, so that's about 1.2 minutes per mark. Use a timer, a quiet room, your exam calculator and your board's formula booklet, nothing else.
- Don't get stuck. If a question has taken twice its marks in minutes, mark it, move on and come back at the end. That's a real exam skill, and practice is the place to learn it.
- Show all your working. Most marks are for method, so write it in a way an examiner can follow.
How to mark it (the part most people skip)
Mark strictly with the official mark scheme. Most A Level Maths mark schemes use three kinds of mark:
- M marks for a correct method, even if you make a slip later.
- A marks for an accurate answer. These usually depend on the M mark, so a right answer from wrong working can score nothing.
- B marks for a correct result that doesn't depend on a method.
Then read the examiner report for that paper. It describes the mistakes thousands of students made on each question. It's the closest thing to the examiner telling you what they want to see.
Keep a mistake log
This is what turns a paper into progress. For every mark you lose, write one line:
| Paper and question | Topic | Why I lost it | What I'll do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paper 1, Q7 | Integration by parts | Sign error in the second step | Do 5 by-parts questions slowly, checking signs |
| Paper 3, Q4 | Hypothesis testing | No conclusion in context | Learn how to word the final sentence |
| Paper 2, Q12 | Vectors | Ran out of time | Practise skipping and returning |
Most lost marks fall into four types: didn't know it, careless slip, misread the question or ran out of time. Each needs a different fix, so the log shows you what to work on. Then redo every question you got wrong about a week later, without looking at the answer first.
Use grade boundaries carefully
Grade boundaries change every year, so a score on an old paper is only a rough guide. Use the boundaries from the same year as the paper, and judge yourself on your total over all three papers and over several sittings, not on one result.
Further Maths and admissions tests
Everything above works for Further Maths too. If you're taking STEP, MAT or TMUA, see our admissions tests guide. Those papers are free online and work best once you've done plenty of A Level questions. For when to fit all this in, see the Year 12 and 13 plan.
Last updated October 2026.