How the ratings work, what is covered, and where your data lives. For the full derivation, see the methodology page.
ShinyPapers indexes Cambridge past papers and rates how hard each one actually turned out to be. Instead of working through papers in chronological order, you can filter by difficulty and build a deliberate progression. Each rating comes from the official grade boundaries Cambridge publishes after every exam series.
Cambridge sets grade boundaries after marking, specifically so that a hard paper does not unfairly penalise students — as Ofqual puts it, if a paper is harder the boundaries are lower. ShinyPapers compares each paper against other sittings of that same subject and component, looking at where the A boundary fell, whether the whole A-to-E curve dropped, and how the raw threshold looks in absolute terms. The result is a score from 0 to 100 where 50 is an ordinary sitting of that paper. 67 and above is Hard, 34 to 66 Medium, below 34 Easy. The methodology page explains the weighting and the limitations in full.
Because it mostly tells you which subject you are looking at rather than which paper was hard. Grade boundaries reflect how a paper is structured as well as how difficult it was — Cambridge Assessment has documented boundaries as low as 13% of the maximum purely as a consequence of paper design. A Level Physics 9702 Paper 1 sits far below Maths 9709 Paper 1 in almost every session, so a fixed cutoff marks nearly all of one subject hard and nearly all of the other easy, while hiding the genuinely nasty Maths paper. ShinyPapers used to work this way; it does not any more.
It is the minimum number of marks needed for an A on that specific paper and session, which ShinyPapers also shows as a percentage of the maximum. A threshold of 72% on a 120-mark paper means 87 marks were needed. The figure moves a great deal between sessions and components — swings of 20 percentage points on the same paper number are common, which is exactly why comparing a paper against its own history is informative.
Because Cambridge does not award one at that level. Every grade threshold document states that grade A* does not exist for an individual component; A* is determined from the overall subject grade. So the top boundary on any single paper is A, and that is what ShinyPapers uses.
Yes. Ratings are relative to a component’s recorded history, so ingesting more sittings can shift a score. A paper that looks exceptional against six sittings may look ordinary against twenty. That is the method working as intended, but it does mean a badge you saw last term might read differently now.
A Level: Accounting (9706), Biology (9700), Business (9609), Chemistry (9701), Computer Science (9618), Economics (9708), Further Mathematics (9231), Mathematics (9709), Physics (9702), Psychology (9990). O Level: Additional Mathematics (4037), Business Studies (7115), Chemistry (5070), Computer Science (2210), Economics (2281), English Language (1123), Global Perspectives (2069), Islamiyat (2058), Mathematics D (4024), Pakistan Studies (2059), Physics (5054), Urdu A (3247), Urdu B (3248).
Papers currently span 2015 to 2025, across all three exam series each year: May/June, Oct/Nov, and Feb/Mar (which Cambridge runs from 2020 onwards). Coverage depends on what Cambridge has published grade thresholds for — a paper without a parsed threshold cannot be rated, so it is not listed.
Yes, entirely, and there is no paywall or premium tier planned. Nothing is held back for paying users because there are no paying users.
No. There is no sign-up, no email, no password and no verification link — open the site and start working. Your favourites, completed papers and revision queue are saved in your own browser rather than on a server, so they work immediately without any account.
In your browser’s local storage, on that one device. Nothing is sent to a server, which is why no sign-in is needed. The trade-off is real and worth knowing: your history will not appear on another device or browser, and clearing your browsing data erases it. You can export a backup file from Settings and restore it anywhere.
No cookies are set for visitors, and there is no tracking or advertising cookie. Local storage — which is what your progress uses — is different from a cookie: it is never transmitted with requests, so the server cannot read it. Page views are counted in aggregate with Vercel Analytics, which is configured to work without cookies and does not profile individual visitors. The Privacy page has the detail.
Grade boundaries are parsed from the official grade threshold documents Cambridge publishes after each series. Question papers and mark schemes are linked from PapaCambridge, a widely used third-party repository, and open on their servers — ShinyPapers does not host them.
After each exam series, once Cambridge publishes the grade threshold documents. New papers and boundaries are usually added within a few weeks of release, and every existing paper is re-scored at the same time because the new sittings change what counts as typical.
No. ShinyPapers is an independent, student-built tool with no affiliation with, endorsement from, or connection to Cambridge Assessment International Education or the University of Cambridge. The difficulty ratings are ShinyPapers’s own interpretation of published data, not official Cambridge guidance.
Check it against the official grade threshold document for that session. Boundaries are parsed automatically from hundreds of PDFs, and that process is not error-free — a wrapped table or an unusual layout can produce a bad row. Treat the official document as authoritative.
Start on Easy papers to build speed and expose basic gaps, then move to Medium once you are consistently near the A boundary. Leave Hard papers until late: these are the sittings where a global cohort struggled, and attempting them cold tends to demoralise rather than teach. One caveat — a score describes how other candidates fared, not how you will. A paper rated Easy that lands on your weakest topic will still be hard for you.