A levels

did your school use the 2020 papers or the 2019 papers? for aqa a level chem?

I see you're trying to prepare for chemistry!
When we had mocks, my chemistry teacher was very smart to anticipate how some people would try and cheat on the test by getting one
of those locked past papers (from those years stated). What my teacher did now was, he used a different exam board paper (OCR) as
they had similar question to us (AQA).

See how pointless it was to think like that. Your teacher could just jump to another exam board.

In preparation for your mocks just do as many past paper questions as you can, the more the better. What should matter here is that
your comfortable providing answers the way they want on the mark scheme and obviously recalling the information. The chances that the paper your teacher provides you as a mock will be the one you have already done is quite unlikely as most tend to pick and choose questions from multiple sources - that is unless you have a lazy teacher.

What you shouldn't do now, is try to anticipate the paper that you'll do, because the purpose of these mocks are to get you in the right mindset:
to get you working hard. Chances are that if you do get a high grade dishonestly, then you may not actually learn what is needed of you to get that grade you want.

Ultimately, its your decision to do what you like! but do put in the effort now as it'll save you from the stress later on.
Some valuable resources on youtube that I recommend are MaChemguy and allerytutorschemistry; both are really good teachers, the former has done walkthrough past paper questions and the latter has great summaries for the topics.

oh wow lol, I dont undertand how you can use the ocr questions though as they are so different to aqa? did you sit the exam as a 2 hour exam or just like a lot of mini exams? I have prepared btw, was just curious, as to what everyone was doing.

OCR is pretty similar to AQA! obviously not all of its content can be used but there is a fair bit of overlap.

Well in the months leading up to our mocks the exams we sat were maybe 50mins,1 hour, or 1 hr 30mins : it varied quite a bit. For those exams it didn't matter what exam board the questions came from.

Now however, for the ones we did in the hall those were 2 hour long ones and they were strictly aqa questions. I can't be sure whether they were 2020 or 2019 as i've never seen them, but what my teacher did was looked at papers provided by aqa this year and got different questions on those topics. We did one paper on physical and inorganic and another on organic and physical.

ah thats sounds like a good idea. hope you did well on the exams. I got my exams coming up soon. which city are you from btw?

same to you! I'm in london