Twenty-Five Past Papers. Find Out Which Question Beat Everyone.
Marking a set of past papers tells you how each student did. What it rarely tells you — because you marked them one script at a time — is that eleven of them lost the same four marks on question fourteen. GradingPal marks the practice against your rubric and shows you the paper question by question, across the class. The board’s own mark scheme stays the board’s.
You approve every mark. GradingPal is not affiliated with or endorsed by any examination board.
Published Syllabuses, Published Papers, Published Schemes
Cambridge International, AQA, Pearson Edexcel, OCR and WJEC each publish a syllabus, past papers and the mark scheme that goes with every paper. Examining is done by the boards; what happens in school is practice. That makes the teacher’s marking job unusual: she is not designing criteria, she is applying somebody else’s, exactly, across a pile — and the scheme sitting open on the desk does not stop the twenty-fifth script being marked slightly differently from the first. The boards publish the schemes; this page is about the practice.
The Components That Take the Longest
Multiple choice marks itself. Everything else on a paper is why the weekend goes.
- Extended-response questions
- The long ones at the end of the paper
- Structured short answers
- Where a mark hangs on one word being present
- Essay papers
- Literature, history, sociology, business
- Practical and data-response science
- Calculations, method, evaluation
- School-assessed coursework and portfolios
- Where the board moderates rather than marks
Tag Once. Every Grade After That Builds the Picture.
Set your syllabus for the class once, at the start of the course. On any rubric, each criterion has a suggest action — GradingPal proposes the matching syllabus objectives and you accept or dismiss each one. Mark the work as usual. The evidence lands against the objective, so it is not a checkbox but a list of the things students actually wrote. Across a course, that becomes a picture of where a class sits against each one.
What This Doesn’t Claim to Do
It does not replace your school’s reporting, and a teacher approves every mark before it counts.
It does not mark examinations. Those are marked by the boards’ examiners, and nothing here touches that. It does not apply the boards’ mark schemes — those are the boards’ own documents, written for examiners they train, and they are not ours to reproduce or to run; you write the rubric your department works from, and GradingPal holds work against your rows, in your wording. It does not predict a grade or a boundary: grade boundaries are set by the board after the examination, on that year’s paper. Where a component is school-assessed and board-moderated, the mark you submit is yours to award — GradingPal is for the drafts on the way to it. And GradingPal is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or approved by Cambridge International, AQA, Pearson Edexcel, OCR or WJEC. Their names and qualification titles are their trademarks; we use them because that is what the courses are called.
You Marked Down the Pile. The Useful View Is Across It.
A past paper is not one task, it is twenty or thirty small ones with a mark allocation each. Marked script by script, you learn how each student did. Nobody comes out of that weekend able to say which three questions cost the class the most — because that information was never assembled, only lived through.
Because every question is marked against its own criterion, GradingPal can show the paper the other way round: one question, twenty-five answers, with the marks and the responses side by side. The question everyone dropped is visible in a glance rather than in a hunch, and so is the one you had assumed was hard and was not.
That is a teaching output, not a marking one. What to reteach on Monday is a different question from what to write on a script, and it is the one a past paper is actually for.
One Paper, Marked Both Ways Round
- The paper
- A past paper set as a mock, twenty-five scripts, scanned in one batch.
- The rubric
- The department’s own, one row per question, written once and reused for every sitting of that paper.
- Down the pile
- Each student gets a mark per question and feedback on the ones they dropped.
- Across the pile
- Question fourteen, twenty-five answers together — nineteen of them made the same wrong move.
- What you do
- Teach question fourteen again on Monday, and skip the two you had planned to reteach.
The marking was always going to happen. The second view is the part you never had time to build.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can GradingPal mark past papers?
It marks the practice papers your students sit in school, against the rubric your department writes — question by question, and then shows you the paper across the class as well as down it. The board’s examinations are marked by the board.
Does it use the board’s mark scheme?
No. Mark schemes are the boards’ own documents, written for examiners they train, and they are not ours to reproduce or to run. You write the rubric your department works from, in your wording, and student work is held against your rows.
Does it work for Cambridge as well as the UK boards?
Yes, and the same way. Cambridge International, AQA, Pearson Edexcel, OCR and WJEC all publish syllabuses and papers, and the marking job in school is the same in each: apply your rubric consistently across a pile of scripts.
Can it tell me which questions my class found hardest?
Yes — that is the point of marking question by question. Once a set is marked you can look at any single question across every script, with the responses beside the marks, rather than reconstructing it from a weekend of reading.
Will it predict my students’ grades?
No. Grade boundaries are set by the board after the examination, on that year’s paper, so a prediction from a mock would be guesswork dressed up. What you get is what students actually did on the paper you set.
Is GradingPal affiliated with any examination board?
No. GradingPal is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or approved by Cambridge International, AQA, Pearson Edexcel, OCR or WJEC. Their names and qualification titles are their trademarks, and we use them because that is what the courses are called.
Grade One Assignment Free
Write one row per question, mark a mock in a single batch, and look at the paper across the class instead of down it.