How to get a past paper marked

Four ways to get a past paper marked

The first is to mark it yourself. The exam boards publish mark schemes beside their past papers, free on their own websites, and cookie links both by course. It costs nothing and you can do it the same evening, but it takes some honesty, because it is easy to give yourself the mark for an answer that was nearly right.

The second and third are a teacher and a tutor. A teacher will often mark a past paper set as homework or as a mock, and is worth asking about one you did on your own, especially for long written answers, where a mark scheme gives levels rather than points. A tutor can mark a paper with you and go through each mark you lost, which is slower but is where you learn most about what the mark scheme wants.

The fourth is to do it in cookie, where you can do the paper in the browser and mark it there, put in the mark for a paper you did by hand, or have it marked with AI. The sections below say what each of those does and where marking with AI falls short.

How marking against a mark scheme works

A mark scheme lists, for each question, the points or steps that earn marks, and a mark is given only where the answer makes one of them. Examiners are trained to apply it and have to show they can mark real answers to the agreed standard before they start, so the scheme is the standard your real paper will be held to. Mark your own work the same way: go through the scheme point by point and give a mark only where your answer says that point, not where it shows you probably knew it.

Maths and science schemes often split a question into method marks and accuracy marks, so working that is right earns marks even when the final answer is wrong, and many say what to accept, what to ignore and when a mistake from an earlier part can still earn the later marks. Longer written answers are usually marked by levels instead: the examiner decides which level description fits the answer as a whole, then gives a mark within that level. These are the hardest to mark yourself, and the ones where a second opinion is most worth having.

Why the examiner’s report is worth reading

Most boards also publish an examiner’s report on each paper after the exams, which goes through how students answered each question: what the strongest answers did, where marks were commonly lost and which points of the mark scheme were often missed. The mark scheme tells you what earns the marks, and the report tells you how answers that knew the content still failed to earn them.

Read it after you have marked your paper, beside your own answers. Where a question you lost marks on comes up in the report, it often says what was missing, and that is frequently a word, a unit or a line of working rather than the content itself.

Doing a paper in cookie and keeping the mark

Every paper on cookie’s past papers pages has “Your mark” on its own page. If you did the paper by hand, type in your total and it shows the percentage, and the grade where cookie has that series’ grade boundaries, without an account; signing up saves the mark to My papers.

To do the paper in cookie instead, choose “Do this paper”, download the question paper from the board’s website and bring it in, with the mark scheme too if you want to mark it there. You can time yourself, write or type on the paper and give each question its mark, and the board’s files stay on your device.

A paper you did on paper can also come in as photos or a scan, marked or not. If a teacher has marked it already, you can type their marks in or have the AI read them off the page; if not, you can mark it yourself or with AI.

What marking with AI does, and what it does not

With a free account, Mark with AI marks each question against the board’s mark scheme when you have it open, and says what earned each mark and what was missing. Where no mark scheme has been published, it marks from what an examiner would usually expect and says so beside the mark, because the real marks may differ. Marking with AI uses credits, and a free account gets some every month.

It uses what cookie knows about your level and your exams to decide how its comments are worded, never to change the mark. If you have already given a question your own mark, yours stays and the AI’s sits beside it, shown in red where the two differ, and you choose which to keep.

If you tick “Mark it on the paper like an examiner”, it also writes its ticks, crosses, marks and short corrections on the paper in red, as an examiner would, which uses more credits than marking alone. On photos of a paper done by hand they go where it sees your writing, so they can sit a little off.

It is closest on short answers with clear points and least reliable on long answers marked by levels, so treat its mark on an essay as a guide, and ask a teacher or a tutor to look at the ones that matter most.

What happens to the marks afterwards

Every paper you mark in cookie goes into My papers with its score, so you can see how your marks move over time. Each question you dropped marks on goes into a list of questions to redo, and a revision plan made from your past papers puts a session to redo them a couple of days after each paper.

A question you file under one of your topics also counts towards that topic’s score, the record cookie keeps of how well you know each topic, which decides when the topic comes back in your practice and how much time your revision plan gives it.