Publication policy

What's available when?

Annual schedule

Recent exam materials

Past papers and
mark schemes

Preliminary material

Examiners' reports

Specifications

Version numbers

Exam results

Grade boundaries

Teachers' guides

Preliminary and pre-release material

Some of AQA's exam material is sent to centres in advance of the examinations.

• Information for candidates may be supplied before the exam and then taken into the exam room: for example, case studies and source material. Sometimes teachers have a defined period in which to arrange a controlled test or other non-timetabled assessment. These documents are confidential and must be kept secure until the release date to candidates. This is often known as pre-release material.
• Information such as teachers' notes is related to the exams but is non-confidential and is not taken into the exam room. This is generally called preliminary material.
• Some of these documents include third-party copyright material.
• The documents are sent to centres on various dates before the examination. In some cases the material is issued to candidates on a specified date, in other cases centres can choose when to make the material available to candidates, within a specified time period, and other material is for teachers not candidates.
• These materials are often sent to centres before the closing date for entries. The number of copies sent to centres is based on estimated entries, Centres that do not submit estimated entries for units with pre-release material will not receive papers.

To give centres access to these documents via the Website, as many as possible will be published on the assessment material page for the relevant specification according to the following policy.

1. Material that is available to candidates and teachers is published on the Website within a few days of the date of issue to candidates, so that teachers have first access to the documents and can introduce them to candidates before they are available from the Website.
2. Material for which centres may choose a date of issue to candidates is not published on the Website, so that the documents are not available to candidates until the date chosen by the teacher.
3. Material that is only for teachers is not published on the Website, so that candidates cannot access these documents.
4. Material that includes third-party copyright material is not published on the Website for copyright reasons.

Lists of pre-release and preliminary material are published at the beginning of each school year, called:

• Early question papers and/or preliminary material for AQA GCSE, GNVQ and ELC
• Early question papers and/or preliminary material for AQA GCE, VCE and FSMQ

which can be found on the Library page of the Administration section of the Website.

These lists indicate the documents that it is intended will be published on the AQA Website.