What this covers
- One document per weak topic, assembled from every year you have
- Extract the mark scheme pages into a separate answer key
- Number the pages before printing
- Twenty minutes to build, and it replaces hours of hunting
A folder of past papers is organised by sitting, because that is how the material was published. It is almost never how you want to revise. When you are working on one weak topic, a paper is nine-tenths irrelevant, and moving between six papers to find six questions is most of the session.
A topic pack inverts that. One document, every question on the topic, drawn from every year you have. It takes about twenty minutes to build and it turns a folder into a worksheet that is precisely targeted at the thing you are bad at.
Why this beats a textbook exercise
Textbook questions are written to teach. Exam questions are written to discriminate, and they are written by the people who will write yours. Their phrasing, their mark allocation and their particular habits of misdirection are the thing you are actually preparing for.
A topic pack also gives you something a textbook cannot: a visible progression. Fifteen questions on the same idea across six years shows you how examiners escalate it - which variations recur, which one year was unusually hard, and what the standard version looks like.
Building the pack
Twenty minutes for a six-year span, once you know the topic.
- Pick one topic, narrowly
'Mechanics' is too broad to be a pack. 'Projectile motion' is a pack. Narrow enough that fifteen questions genuinely rhyme with each other.
- Open each paper and note the pages
Work through the papers in order, writing down the page numbers that carry a relevant question. Do not extract as you go - note everything first, then extract, or you will lose your place.
- Extract from each paper
Use Extract Pages with your list, one paper at a time. Name each result after its paper so you can keep the order straight.
- Merge in chronological order
Oldest first. Turn bookmarks on so the outline names the source paper of each section.
- Build the answer key separately
Repeat the extraction on the mark schemes, and merge those into a second document. Keeping it separate is the whole point - see the guide on splitting papers from mark schemes.
- Number the pages
If you will print it. An unnumbered merged pack is unrecoverable if you drop it.
What you need
Finding the questions quickly
If your papers have a text layer, search rather than scroll. Search each paper for the vocabulary the topic uses - not the topic name, which rarely appears, but the words the questions are made of.
For projectile motion that is 'projected', 'horizontally', 'time of flight'. For hypothesis testing it is 'significance level', 'null hypothesis', 'evidence to reject'. Three or four terms will find almost every relevant question, and you can scan for the rest.
Include the diagrams
If a question refers to a figure on a previous page, extract that page too. A pack full of questions that cannot be answered because their diagram was left behind is a surprisingly easy thing to build.
A typical pack
- Span
- Six years, both variants where relevant
- Questions
- Twelve to twenty on one narrow topic
- Build time
- About twenty minutes
- Documents produced
- Two - questions, and a separate answer key
- Best used
- Before timed practice, not instead of it
How to work through it
Not front to back in one sitting. Fifteen questions on one topic done consecutively produces a strong feeling of competence that is largely pattern-matching on the previous question rather than on the underlying idea.
Three or four at a time, spread across a week, with the answer key closed until you have finished all of them, gets you the interleaving that makes the practice stick. The pack exists so the material is ready when you sit down; it is not a to-do list to be cleared.
Packs worth building first
In roughly this order, for most subjects.
| Pack | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|
| Your weakest topic | The highest-value twenty minutes available to you |
| The highest-mark recurring question | Every paper has one; practise the shape, not just the content |
| The topic you always run out of time on | Speed is a separate skill and needs its own practice |
| Anything with a standard method | Where the marks are for following a procedure exactly |
Before you call the pack finished
- Every question is on the topic you chose
- Diagrams and data pages referred to by a question are included
- Chronological order, oldest first
- Bookmarks name the source paper for each section
- A separate answer key exists and is not in the same file
- Pages numbered, if you will print it
Questions and answers
How long does a topic pack take to build?
About twenty minutes for a six-year span once you know which topic. Most of that is reading the papers to find the questions; the extraction and merge are a minute or two.
Should the mark scheme be in the same file?
No. Keep it separate. The entire benefit of the pack is that you work the questions without the answers available, and putting them in the same document undoes that for no gain.
Can I share a topic pack with my class?
Within a study group, this is the sort of personal use exam boards tolerate. Publishing it anywhere public is republishing their copyrighted material, which they do pursue.
What if my papers are scans and I cannot search them?
You will have to page through them visually, which roughly doubles the build time. The thumbnail strip in a reader makes this faster than scrolling, because questions have a recognisable shape at that scale.
