AQA A-level Physics revision
AQA A-level Physics (7408) is assessed by three written papers plus the practical endorsement. This page sets out what each section covers, where the 12 required practicals sit, and — the part worth your time — what the examiners’ reports say costs marks year after year.
Specification Focus Questions for AQA A-level Physics — 19 booklets, 760 Q&As, 135 worked examples, 232 exam tips, 192 pages. All 12 required practicals and all five optional topics.
How the qualification is assessed
- Paper 1 — 2 hours, 34%. Sections 3.1 to 3.6.2, plus periodic motion. Includes 25 multiple choice marks.
- Paper 2 — 2 hours, 34%. Thermal physics, fields and nuclear physics, plus assumed knowledge from earlier sections. Also includes 25 multiple choice marks.
- Paper 3 — 2 hours, 32%. Section A is practical skills and data analysis; Section B is your chosen option from the five.
- Practical endorsement — reported separately as a pass or fail, assessed across the course against the CPAC criteria.
The content, section by section
3.1 Measurements and their errors · 3.2 Particles and radiation · 3.3 Waves · 3.4 Mechanics and materials · 3.5 Electricity · 3.6 Further mechanics and thermal physics · 3.7 Fields and their consequences · 3.8 Nuclear physics
Then one option from five: 3.9 Astrophysics, 3.10 Medical physics, 3.11 Engineering physics, 3.12 Turning points in physics or 3.13 Electronics.
What the examiners’ reports actually say
Read several years of 7408 reports together and the same errors recur. Very few are failures of physics.
Particles and radiation
Students who correctly identified a change in strangeness then attributed it to the strong interaction — a change in strangeness means it is weak. Lepton numbers of antiparticles caused trouble: a positive muon is an antiparticle, so its muon lepton number is −1. And one report describes a mark being withheld because a student calculated the number of nucleons correctly and then called it the number of neutrons.
Quantum phenomena
Many students merely mentioned the threshold frequency without explaining it, and scored nothing. Power of ten errors when reading values off a graph are flagged repeatedly, as is the MeV to joules conversion — it needs both the 10⁶ and the 1.60 × 10⁻¹⁹.
Waves
Confusion between phase difference and path difference is named explicitly — one is an angle, the other a distance. Students asserted constructive and destructive interference without explaining how they arise. And the critical angle was misidentified as the angle between the ray and the surface rather than the normal.
Mechanics and electricity
Careless suvat errors appear year after year. In electricity, using the emf as the terminal pd is a named common error, and many students omitted any reference to internal resistance at all. One report notes bluntly that students often have difficulty with electricity questions at this level.
Thermal physics
A reported favourite: students converting water to steam and forgetting to raise it to 100 °C first. Others used data for the container instead of the water. Plan the stages before calculating.
Practical skills, Paper 3 Section A
This is where the reports are most specific. Check for a false origin before reading an intercept. Look for a multiplier on the axis label — a missed one on an L² axis sent answers out by 10⁻⁵. A best-fit line does not have to be straight. Truncating to 2 significant figures when the margin of error is small is described as ill-advised. And two gaps in specification knowledge are named: using a CRO as a clock, and using a mirror to avoid parallax error.
The options
In Engineering physics, students omitted the frictional torque, used the wrong section of the graph, and added areas under an angular velocity graph without allowing for negative values. A very common misunderstanding was thinking friction accounts for the difference in area between the theoretical and actual indicator diagrams. Examiners also note that precise terminology is expected — a question asking for a definition of an adiabatic change wants no energy transferred by heating, not happens quickly.
One more, which applies everywhere: examiners mark exactly what they see. They cannot give credit for what they think a student meant, and ambiguous or contradictory answers routinely lose marks the student had clearly earned.
Specification Focus Questions for AQA A-level Physics
Every statement in the specification rewritten as a question, with the answer directly underneath, in the specification’s own order. Cover the answer, have a go, then check.
19 booklets · 760 questions and answers · 135 worked examples · 232 exam tips · 192 pages
All 12 required practicals written up as method questions. 19 extended-response questions with full mark schemes. All five optional topics included, so one purchase covers whichever option you teach.
Every exam tip above, and two hundred more, sits beside the question it applies to — so students meet the warning at the moment it matters rather than in a list they will not read.
Independent revision resources. Not published by or affiliated with AQA.
Teaching Eduqas as well? There is a matching guide and pack for Eduqas A Level Physics. And everything on this site for AQA GCSE Physics is free, including 804 exam-style questions with mark schemes.