Syllabus guides by exam board

Why the syllabus code matters more than the subject name

Two students can both be sitting “IGCSE Computer Science” and be entered for different syllabuses, with different papers, different weightings and different past papers worth revising from. The subject name does not tell you which. The four-digit code does.

This is the first thing we establish when a family gets in touch, and a good half of parents cannot answer it, which is not a criticism: nothing in the normal school communication makes it obvious. It matters because preparing against the wrong specification version costs a term, and because a student revising from papers for a syllabus they are not entered for will meet question styles on the day that they have never practised. Here is how to find your child's code, which takes about five minutes.

What is on these pages

For each syllabus we cover: every paper, its duration, its raw mark total, its weighting toward the final grade, whether a calculator or pre-release material is involved, and the topic areas each paper draws on. Then the part that is actually ours rather than the board's: where marks are most often lost on that particular component, and what to do about it.

Every figure on these pages was checked field by field against the awarding body's own published specification document, and each record carries the source link and the syllabus version it was taken from. That check caught things worth catching. Where a detail here disagrees with something you have been told, the awarding body's own PDF is the authority, and we would genuinely like to know: tell us and we will correct it.

What we have verified, and what we have not

We publish syllabus detail only where we have read the specification ourselves. That is a deliberately short list, and it is short on purpose: syllabus codes, paper structures and weightings are exactly the kind of detail that is easy to half-remember and expensive to get wrong, so an unverified page would be worse than no page.

This does not limit what we teach. We tutor 45 subjects across every major board at IGCSE, A Level, IB and university level, including Edexcel, AQA, OCR and the IB. What it limits is what we are willing to publish as fact. If your board is not listed below, the subject pages set out what the subject assesses and where marks go, and a tutor will work from your actual specification.

Verified syllabuses

How to use a syllabus page

Read the paper breakdown first and work out what a mark is worth in minutes, because that single number governs how long to spend on each question and is the most common reason strong students run out of time. Then look at the weightings: students routinely over-revise the component they enjoy, which is usually the one carrying the smaller share of the grade.

After that, the useful work is diagnostic rather than more reading. Our guide to using past papers properly sets out the method, and the worked answers show the technique on real problems rather than describing it.

A note on past papers

We do not host them. Past papers and mark schemes are the awarding body's copyright, and the right place to get them is the board's own site or your school, which will have access to the full series. What we can do is tell you which ones are relevant to your syllabus version and how to get value out of them, which is where most of the benefit is anyway.