What “PMT past papers” actually means
The phrase covers two things people conflate. PMT — physicsandmathstutor.com — is a free archive run by Bristol University students. It hosts past papers, mark schemes, revision notes and topic questions sliced by chapter. The papers themselves are produced by the exam boards: AQA, Edexcel (Pearson), OCR, WJEC and Cambridge International. PMT just makes them easy to find, which the boards’ own sites historically didn’t.
The single most useful PMT feature isn’t the full papers, oddly enough. It’s the topic-by-topic question packs. You can grab every electricity question from Edexcel A-level physics 2017–2023 in one PDF, with the mark scheme attached. That’s how you get 30 reps on capacitors in a week without doing 30 mixed papers. Use those for skill-building. Use full papers for stamina and pacing.
A note on dates. Anything before 2017 at GCSE was the old spec — different syllabus, different command words. Don’t waste time on those. At A-level the cutoff is 2018 for most boards. If a paper is older than that, treat it as a topic exercise, not a real mock.
Building a six-month run-up that actually works
January through Easter is when your past-paper habit either makes you or stalls. Most students do too much, too randomly, and burn out by April. The pattern that works: alternate weeks of topic packs and full papers, with a fixed review session the morning after each.
Start with PMT topic questions on your three weakest areas — be honest, the ones you avoid. For A-level physics that’s usually nuclear or capacitors. For GCSE maths it’s circle theorems and iteration. Do 90 minutes of those questions on a Monday, mark Tuesday, log mistakes in a single sheet you keep open all term.
The following week, sit one full paper closed-book and timed. Mark it yourself the next day — not the same evening, you’re too tired and too generous. Look at the examiner report alongside the mark scheme. Note which questions cost you marks not because you didn’t know the topic but because you misread, ran out of time, or wrote a fuzzy explanation. Those are different fixes. Misreading is solved by underlining command words. Time pressure is solved by skipping high-mark questions you can return to. Fuzzy explanations are solved by reading examiner reports — they literally print the wording that scores.
By Easter you should have done six full papers and around twenty topic packs. That leaves another six papers for the final five weeks, plus targeted work on the two or three topics still costing you marks.
What good past-paper review looks like
Bad review: read the mark scheme, nod, file the paper, feel briefly competent. Good review takes longer than the paper itself.
Pull every question that scored less than full marks. For each one write three things in your error log: what the question actually asked (in your own words), what you wrote, and what the mark scheme wanted. The gap between the second and third is your real revision target.
Worked example. Edexcel A-level physics 2022 paper 2 had a six-mark question on the Doppler effect for a galactic redshift. Most students wrote about wavelength stretching and lost two marks because they didn’t connect z = Δλ/λ to recession velocity quantitatively. The mark scheme wanted both the equation and a numerical step. If your error log says “didn’t link the equation to v”, the next week’s revision is twenty minutes on Doppler numerical questions, not a re-read of the whole astrophysics chapter.
Russell Group physics applicants — and especially Imperial, UCL and the Cambridge NatSci pool — should also work through STEP and PAT past papers in parallel from October onwards. Those are a different beast and PMT doesn’t host them; admissionstesting.org and the Cambridge Assessment site do.
Where a tutor pays for itself
Past papers are free. Mark schemes are free. The thing you can’t buy on PMT is somebody watching you work and stopping you the second your method drifts. That’s what the first hour with a tutor catches — usually one or two habits you didn’t know you had. A student who always skips the unit check on momentum questions, for example, will lose three marks an exam until someone points it out. After that, never again.
Hourly rates on TheTutorLink for A-level maths and physics specialists sit in the £30–£45 range, often less than agency platforms because we charge tutors a flat 5% rather than 20–25%. The first session is free, so you can run a paper through with a tutor before deciding whether to keep going. Most students who book do four to six hours across the final term — roughly £150–£250 total — and use them on the questions their school teacher doesn’t have time to mark in detail. Whether that’s worth it depends on the grade gap you’re closing. For someone sitting on a B aiming at A*, an hour of targeted past-paper review usually pays for itself in the first week.