A printable past paper tracker for marks and mistakes
One row per paper. Record the board, the paper and the date, then your raw mark and what grade it landed on. The final column is where the value is: the topics that cost you marks, which become your next revision sessions. A tracker with no follow-up column is a scoreboard, and watching your own scores does not teach you anything.
Last updated 20 August 2026 · Written and checked by the GCSEwiz team
What is on the sheet
- Twelve rows covering roughly a full season of papers
- Columns for raw mark, percentage and the grade it fell on
- A "go back to" column that feeds straight into your next sessions
2 sheets · A4 landscape · black and white
Choose landscape in your printer dialog, or Save as PDF to keep a copy.
Past paper tracker
Page 1 of 2One row per paper, and fill the last column the same day you mark it. Boundaries move every year, so the grade column is a guide from that series rather than a promise about yours.
| Date sat | Series and paper | Timed? | Raw mark | % | Grade | Topics to go back to |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Mistake log
Page 2 of 2For every question you lost marks on, be specific. "Did not know it" and "knew it, misread the question" need completely different fixes.
| Paper and question | Topic | Marks lost | Did not know it / knew it but slipped | What I will do about it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
When the same topic appears three times on this page, stop doing papers for a day and go and learn that topic properly. Another paper will only tell you the same thing again.
The mark scheme is the document worth reading
Most students download the paper, do it, tick their answers and file the mark. That treats the mark scheme as an answer key, when it is really a description of what examiners pay for. Marks sit on named methods, on using data from the source, on a specific word appearing in an explanation.
Reading the scheme carefully for one paper teaches you more about scoring than doing a second paper does. The mistake log exists to make you read it.
Two kinds of lost mark, two different fixes
A mark lost because you have never understood indices needs teaching. A mark lost because you wrote the right answer in the wrong units needs a habit. If you file them together, you will spend your revision re-teaching content you already know while the careless losses carry on happening in every paper.
Over a season the split is usually revealing. Plenty of students discover that a third of what they lose is not knowledge at all, and that third is by far the cheapest to recover.
When to start doing papers at all
Papers are the best thing you can do close to the exam and a fairly blunt instrument in October, when half the paper covers content you have not been taught. Early in the course, use papers by topic instead: find the questions on what you have covered and leave the rest.
From the spring onwards, whole papers under time are worth their weight, because the skill they test (managing a two-hour paper without running out of time) cannot be practised any other way.