When you're revising for your GCSE exams, you want to make the most of your study time.

So, we invited the experts at the AQA exam board to share their tips and advice on preparing for GCSE Design Technology exams.

The article that follows has been written by an AQA curriculum expert, based on their years of experience in the assessment of their subject.  

You can find more articles in this series, covering a range of subjects at both GCSE and A-level, over on our revision section.

Also on The Student Room, you can find student discussion of 2024 GCSE exams.

Section A – Core technical principles (20 marks)

This is a mixture of multiple-choice and short answer questions assessing all the material areas.  

Section B – Specialist technical principles (30 marks)

Several short answer questions (2–5 marks) and one extended response to assess a more in-depth knowledge of technical principles. This might be done through one or more material area.

Section C – Designing and making principles (50 marks)

A mixture of short answer and extended response questions

Remember not to give answers in generic terms such as ‘wood’ or ‘plastic’. Try to be specific e.g. ‘oak’ or ‘high impact polystyrene’.

Make sure you read the question carefully. Look at the command words. What’s being expected of you and how many marks will you gain from answering this question? That’ll give you an idea of how much detail you need to give. 

Where possible, give examples to explain a point. This can show your depth of understanding and could be the extra information needed to push you up to a higher mark band.

Don’t rush through the multiple-choice questions thinking they’re easy. There will be some difficult questions in there that need a lot of thought and focus. Make sure you read them carefully.

If the question is multiple-choice, eliminate the answers you know are wrong and choose your answer from the ones you have left.

Recognise the importance of taking time to think and plan answers to extended response questions. Sometimes you’ll be asked for your opinion in these questions.

Make sure you use clear evidence to back up your view. Consider what information might help you to show the examiner the reason for your decision. It’s important to confidently say why you’ve come to that particular conclusion.

Don’t spend time writing an introduction to your answer, as it’s much more important to get as much information down as possible and you may not have much time.

Your answer should be well-organised and structured, and written in a logical way - so consider your answer before you start. 

If you’re not sure what the question is asking you, cross out the words you don’t know and see what’s left – can you recognise key words or concepts that you can write about?

Try not to repeat yourself. This wastes time as you can’t get double marks for the same thing. 

For the specialist technical principles and designing and making principles sections of the paper, you can draw on knowledge from one or more material area.

Make sure you choose the one that you know the most about. You can always give examples of other ones too if the question is open-ended in this way.

Think carefully about which material area will give you access to the most marks depending of your experiences in school.

You need to be able to demonstrate mathematical and scientific knowledge and understanding in relation to design and technology.

Make sure you show your working out - even if you don’t get the correct answer, in many cases you can gain marks from the methods you use to try or the stages you go through.

If you find these questions particularly difficult or time-consuming, you might wish to leave them to the end when you can really focus on them.

Keep an eye on the clock. Think about how long you normally take in practice tests and make sure you don’t go over this time on each section.

If you don’t know the answer to a question, don’t let it put you off - leave it and come back to it at the end.