When Should You Start A Level Maths Past Papers? (And Will You Run Out?)

If past papers are the best practice, it's tempting to start them as early as you can. But a past paper is written to test content you already know reasonably well. If you start one before you do, one of two things tends to happen, and neither is real progress.

Exam questions are not designed to teach. They are designed to assess.

There is a cost to confidence as well. A full paper attempted before you are ready means question after question you cannot do yet, and that tends to put students off papers just when they need them most.

Plenty of students leave past papers too late, so this is about finding the sweet spot rather than holding off. You want to have covered enough content for a paper to be a fair test, and for most students the latest to start full papers is when you have finished all the course content. If you have, early April is a good time to be starting.

You don't have to wait for everything, either. If your school finishes the pure content before the statistics and mechanics, you can start the pure papers then. The papers from one exam series don't have to be done together: do the pure papers when you are ready for them, and the applied ones when you have finished those topics.

1. Year 12 and early Year 13Mixed exam questions, and AS papers
   A regular mixed set of exam questions on the topics you have finished. AS papers count here too, and in early Year 13 as well (more on that below).
2. As each part of the course is finishedThat part's papers
   Finished the pure content? Start the pure papers, timed, while you are still finishing the statistics and mechanics.
3. By early April, if the content is doneFull papers in exam conditions
   Whole papers against the clock, each marked properly and its mistakes followed up.
4. The last monthAbout three papers a week
   By now the content should be secure, and the papers are for technique, timing and finding where marks are still being lost.

When your school finishes the course matters, and it varies a lot. If you are doing mixed exam questions regularly through the year, starting full papers a bit later is not a big deal. But give yourself plenty of time, for two reasons: to practise in exam conditions, and to find out which topics you still need to work on while there is time to work on them.

There are more A Level Maths papers than most students expect. For each board:

The most diligent students might get through all of them, but most won't. The catch is a different one. If you have been doing exam questions all through the year, as you should, you will already have seen a fair few of the questions on the papers. That makes a past paper less useful for the thing you want it for in the last few months: finding out where you actually are now.

So it is worth thinking about the order you do them in.

Every board's papers, with mark schemes and examiner's reports, are on our past papers page.

When students send me papers they have marked themselves, I nearly always find a substantial number of marks they have given themselves that they would not have got in the exam. Here is how that happens, on one exam-style question and one of the most common ways to lose a mark.

The questionThe curve C has equation y = ¾x². The point P on C has x-coordinate 1. Find the equation of the tangent to C at P, giving your answer in the form ax + by + c = 0, where a, b and c are integers. (4 marks)

Marked by the student

Every line ticked: 4 out of 4.The mark scheme's line was the same line, so it looked right.

Re-marked

The last mark goes: 3 out of 4.An example of how the marks might be split. The last one is for the answer in the form the question asked for.

The mark scheme's answer was 6x − 4y − 3 = 0. The student saw it was the same line as theirs and ticked it. But the question asked for that form, with integers, and the last mark is for getting there. Examiners' reports regularly mention this one. When you mark your own paper, check each answer against what the question asked for, not just against the number in the mark scheme. Those are exactly the marks a generous self-marker gives away.

A free account gives you past papers for every board, with mark schemes and examiner's reports, exam questions by topic, and flashcards for the key facts and formulae, so a question you can't start is never just a formula you can't remember. Premium membership adds live online lessons, recorded, plus predicted papers. See what each includes.

If you would like someone to mark your papers properly and work on what they show, The A Level Maths Tutor offers 1-1 tuition online and small Exam Practice groups.