Where to Find IB Past Papers, and Why You Cannot Just Download Them

You cannot legally download IB past papers from a public website, and the sites that offer them anyway are not a grey area: they are redistributing material the IB owns. The IB states that it holds copyright on its content whether or not a copyright line appears on the page, and that exam papers, mark schemes and the questionbank may not be publicly redistributed without a written licence.

This is not a technicality nobody enforces. It is the reason the free archive you bookmarked last term has stopped loading.

There are two routes that work, and one of them is almost certainly already paid for on your behalf.

Most IB World Schools buy full access to past examinations and to the IB Questionbank. If your school is one of them, your teachers already hold the papers, the mark schemes and the subject reports, and they are allowed to use them with you.

This is the route almost nobody uses properly. Students spend an evening hunting through mirror sites for a Paper 1 that their own coordinator could have handed them in thirty seconds. Ask your subject teacher first, and if the answer is vague, ask the IB coordinator directly: schools track their resource access centrally, and the coordinator is the person who knows what the school actually holds.

Be specific when you ask. "Can I have some past papers" gets a shrug. "Could I have Paper 1 and Paper 2 from May 2022 and May 2023, with the mark schemes, so I can sit them under timed conditions" gets a file.

The IB sells its own material through Follett, its exclusive publishing partner. Individual papers and mark schemes are sold separately and cost a few dollars each, so a complete paper with its mark scheme lands in the low tens of dollars, and a full set for a Higher Level subject costs more than that.

It is not free, and for a family already paying international school fees it is a rounding error. What you get in exchange is the real document, correctly paginated, with the mark scheme that actually belongs to it. That last point matters more than students expect: a large share of the pirated PDFs in circulation are mismatched, carrying a mark scheme from a different variant or a different session, which teaches you the wrong answer with complete confidence.

The IB does not release the papers from the two most recent examination sessions for open practice. If you are looking for last May, you are looking for something that does not exist outside a school, and any site claiming to have it is either wrong or is hosting something it obtained improperly.

This is worth internalising, because it changes how you should plan. The most recent material you can reliably work with is two or three years old, and that is fine: the syllabus has not moved, and the way marks are awarded has not moved either.

Every student I work with eventually hits the same wall: the papers are finished, and the instinct is to hunt for more. It is almost always the wrong instinct, because by that point more papers stop teaching you anything.

Three things pay better.

First, the subject reports. The IB publishes, for each session and each subject, a document in which senior examiners describe exactly where candidates lost marks and which questions were answered worst. It is the closest thing to reading the examiner's mind, and almost nobody uses it, because it is not a paper and does not feel like practice.

Second, the command terms. A very large share of lost marks in the IB is not mathematics or physics at all: it is answering "describe" when the question said "explain", or "state" when it said "justify". The command terms are defined in the subject guide, they are short, and knowing them cold is worth more than another Paper 2.

Third, your own wrong answers. Take a question you got wrong three weeks ago, cover your working, and do it again from scratch. If it comes out clean twice in a row, at speed, the method is yours. If it does not, that is the topic that is going to cost you in the exam, and no fresh paper would have told you.

Beyond the copyright question, which is the IB's to enforce and not mine, there is a practical reason to be careful with the free archives: you cannot tell what you are getting.

Papers are uploaded by whoever has them, which means variants get mislabelled, mark schemes get paired with the wrong session, pages go missing from the middle of a scan, and figures come out unreadable. A student who sits a paper under timed conditions and then marks it against the wrong mark scheme does not just waste an afternoon: they walk away confident about a method that will not score.

If you are going to use material of uncertain provenance anyway, at minimum check that the session, the paper number and the variant printed on the mark scheme match the paper in front of you, character for character.