CIE Insider

The Practical Test, decoded.

Every rule, error and examiner pet-peeve from CIE Examiner Reports 2021–2025 — distilled into a guide you can revise from, drill against, and check yourself with.

4 questions · Measurement · Graph · Optics/Thermal · Planning 6 variants · 51 / 52 / 53 / 61 / 62 / 63 25 ranked criticisms · from 5 years of reports
Where to start

One paper. Roughly the same mistakes, every series.

CIE examiners write reports after every series. We read all of them from 2021 to 2025 — every variant — and the same handful of errors come up every single time. Master those, and you've protected most of the marks in Paper 5.

Use The Rules as a reference. Drill yourself in Drill Mode. After every practice paper, run the Self-Audit to find what slipped.

Your progress

Self-Audit completion

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Top 5 marks lost — across every series, 2021–2025

If you only fix five things…

Ranked by how many series each error appeared in. Each one shows up almost every paper. Click any item to jump to the rule.

  1. Best-fit line drawn dot-to-dot. Graph work
  2. Best-fit line forced through the origin. Graph work
  3. 5% / 10% tolerance rule not applied when comparing values. Conclusions
  4. Conclusion method missing — a prediction is written instead. Planning
  5. Generic sources of error: "parallax", "human error". Sources of error
Or jump straight to a section

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The Rules

Every rule, every common error, every examiner quote.

Filter by topic or search for a keyword. Each rule is grounded in actual examiner reports — the wording is theirs, not ours.

Drill Mode

Test yourself on the things examiners actually mark.

15 questions drawn from the most common errors across 5 years of examiner reports. Pick a mode and go.

Ready when you are.

Choose a topic, or attempt them all.

Self-Audit

After every practice paper, tick off what you got right.

For each box you can't tick, jump back to the relevant rule. Your progress is saved in this browser.

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The full list

25 most-criticised mistakes, ranked.

Ordered by how many series each error appeared in across Papers 5 and 6, 2021–2025. The higher up the list, the more marks the average candidate loses to it.

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Skill area
Criticism
Series
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