About ShinyPapers

There is no shortage of Cambridge past papers. There is a shortage of any way to tell them apart. Every repository presents them as a flat list by year and session, which leaves you working through papers in chronological order — an ordering that has nothing to do with difficulty.

That ordering has a real cost. Sit a brutal paper too early and you conclude you are hopeless at the subject, when in fact you picked a paper that a global cohort also struggled with. Sit only gentle papers and you walk into the exam with false confidence. The information needed to avoid both is published by Cambridge, in the grade threshold documents, and essentially nobody reads them because they are PDFs full of unlabelled numbers.

• Parses the official grade threshold documents for every subject and session, capturing the full A to E boundary curve.
• Scores each paper against other sittings of that same component, so difficulty means something within a subject instead of across unrelated ones.
• Lets you filter by difficulty, so you can build a deliberate progression rather than working chronologically.
• Links straight to the question paper and mark scheme, and tracks what you have done.

The rating method, including its limitations, is written up in full on the methodology page. It is worth reading before you trust a score.

There is nothing to sign up for. No email, no password, no verification link. Open the site and start working.

Your favourites, completed papers and revision queue are stored in your own browser rather than on a server. That is a genuine trade-off and worth being clear about: your data does not follow you to another device or browser, and clearing site data erases it. In exchange, there is no account to create, nothing to leak, and no personal information for anyone to collect. You can export a backup file from settings and restore it anywhere.

• No paywall, no premium tier, no feature held back for paying users.
• No adverts and no selling of data. There is no personal data to sell.
• Not a tutoring service, a question bank, or a source of model answers. The mark schemes are Cambridge’s and are linked, not reproduced.
• Not a predictor. ShinyPapers describes how a past cohort performed; it does not forecast your grade or guess what will appear on a future paper.

ShinyPapers is an independent, student-built tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Cambridge Assessment International Education or the University of Cambridge. Grade boundary data is taken from Cambridge’s own published documents; question papers and mark schemes are linked from PapaCambridge, a third-party repository, and are not hosted here.

If a paper is misfiled, a boundary looks wrong, or a rating seems obviously off, it is worth checking against the official threshold document for that session — parsing hundreds of PDFs is not error-free.