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Exams · 29 min read

Past Papers in Pakistan: Where to Find Them and How to Use Them

A verified directory of official past papers for every major Pakistani board and for Cambridge, plus the research on what actually makes practice papers work.

By Scoodemy team · 22 Oct 2026

Most articles about past papers in Pakistan tell you that past papers are important and then never tell you where to get one. This one is built the other way round. The first half is a directory: which boards publish their own question papers, at what URL, covering which years, and which boards publish nothing at all. The second half is what the research says about using them, which is more specific than "solve past papers daily."

Scoodemy is a tutoring marketplace. We do not host past papers and we are not going to mirror a board's copyrighted paper to win a download. What we can do is spend a day opening every board website in the country and write down what is genuinely there, including the parts that are broken.

Some of it is worse than you would expect. The website of Pakistan's largest examination board currently serves nothing but a result-lookup box. The best-known O Level past papers mirror in the world now redirects to an online gambling site. Both are things you would want to know before sending a fifteen-year-old to search for past papers unsupervised.

Accuracy note — read this first

Last verified: 23 September 2026. Every link below was opened on that date and the description reflects what was actually on the page. Board websites in Pakistan change without notice, move to new domains, lose sections during redesigns and go offline for weeks. A URL that worked this morning may not work next term.

Before you rely on anything here, confirm it on the board's own site. If a coaching centre, a YouTube video or this page disagrees with the board, the board is right.

We have not linked to any file that appears to be a scanned or re-typed copy of a paper hosted without permission. Where the only available copy is unofficial, we say so and leave the decision to you.

Where the official past papers actually are

Pakistan has around thirty examination boards. They do not coordinate their websites, so there is no single national past papers archive, and the quality of provision ranges from genuinely excellent to nothing at all.

Here is the summary, followed by the detail.

Board Official past papers? Where Coverage seen on 23 Sep 2026
FBISE (Federal) Yes fbise.edu.pk old papers SSC-I, SSC-II, HSSC-I, HSSC-II, roughly 2023 onwards
BISE Gujranwala Yes, the best structured Past 5 Years Papers All four classes, 2021–2025 depending on subject
BISE Multan Yes, the deepest archive Past question papers 9th, 10th, Part-I, Part-II, back to 2015–2016, many with keys
BISE Rawalpindi Yes, by subject SSC and HSSC 46 SSC and 50 HSSC subjects, years not labelled
BISE Lahore No home.biselahore.com Downloads section holds forms only
BISE Faisalabad Model papers only, scattered web.bisefsd.edu.pk Model papers posted as news items with Drive links
BISE Sargodha No bisesargodha.edu.pk Resolves to a result page
BISE Sahiwal No bisesahiwal.edu.pk Redirects to the result portal
BISE DG Khan No past papers section found bisedgkhan.edu.pk About, schedule, downloads, support
BISE Bahawalpur Model papers SSC and HSSC Scheme of study and model papers
BSEK Karachi Model papers bsek.edu.pk Under News, Model Paper category
BIEK Karachi Model papers biek.edu.pk model papers 2026 and older model papers
BISE Peshawar Model papers plus topper scripts HSSC model papers SLO-based model papers 2025 onward
BBISE Quetta Yes, via Drive folders bbise.edu.pk/PastPapers Two folders, SSC and HSSC, contents not described
AJK BISE Mirpur No ajkbise.net Results and gazettes only

FBISE past papers

The Federal Board is the most searched of all Pakistani boards for past papers, and its provision is reasonable without being outstanding.

The hub is Old Question Papers on fbise.edu.pk, which splits into four pages: SSC-I, SSC-II, HSSC-I and HSSC-II. On the day we checked, the SSC-I page listed the 2026 first annual, the 2025 second annual, a 2025 bundle as a ZIP archive, and separate pages for 2024 and 2023. HSSC-II followed the same pattern. So: about three or four years deep, in a mix of individual PDFs, ZIP files and sub-pages. Not elegant, but real, official and free.

Two other FBISE pages are more valuable than the past papers themselves and almost nobody uses them.

Curriculum and Model Question Papers publishes SLO-based model question papers together with the Assessment Framework and Table of Specifications for each subject. The table of specifications tells you how many marks in each paper come from which learning outcome. If you want to predict what a paper will look like, that beats guessing from three old papers, because it is the instruction the paper setter was given.

Topper Copies publishes scanned answer scripts from top-performing candidates in the 2025 first annual examinations, SSC and HSSC, across nine subjects, usually two or three students' scripts per subject. A past paper tells you the question; a topper's script tells you what a full-marks answer physically looks like — how long, how laid out, how many diagrams, where the working goes. BISE Peshawar does the same in its answer books of top position holders, although its set is from the 2018 SSC annual examination and has not been refreshed since.

Punjab: bise lahore past papers and the rest

Punjab has nine boards and the most uneven provision in the country.

BISE Gujranwala is the model everyone else should copy. Its Past 5 Years Papers page offers question papers for SSC-I, SSC-II, HSSC-I and HSSC-II, sorted by subject and year, with each link opening the complete paper in one file including objective and subjective sections and all available groups. Coverage on the day we looked ran from 2021 to 2025 for most 9th class science subjects, 2022 to 2025 for English and Urdu, and 2022 to 2024 for Pakistan Studies and Islamiyat. Gujranwala also publishes model papers for matric and intermediate separately.

BISE Multan has the deepest archive in Punjab. Its past question papers hub links to four pages: 9th, 10th, Part-I and Part-II. The Part-II page listed sessions from 2015 through to the 2026 first annual, including first and second annual sittings, supply papers and the 2020 and 2021 special examinations. Many entries are explicitly labelled as question papers with answer keys. If you are on any Punjab board, Multan's archive is worth using even if it is not your board, because the Punjab boards examine broadly similar syllabuses.

BISE Rawalpindi takes a different approach: it organises by subject rather than year. Its SSC past papers page lists 46 subjects for 9th and 10th, and the HSSC page lists 50 for 11th and 12th, covering the long tail nobody else bothers with — Punjabi, Persian, tailoring, embroidery, commercial practice. The limitation is that the listings do not label the examination year, so you need to open a file to find out what you have.

BISE Lahore is the disappointment. Lahore is the largest board in Pakistan and its past papers are among the most searched exam documents in the country. On 23 September 2026, biselahore.com served a single page containing a roll-number box, a countdown and a result table. Nothing else. The board's main site lives separately at home.biselahore.com, and its Downloads section contains correction forms, migration forms, duplicate certificate applications and examiner duty proformas. No past papers, no model papers, no syllabus documents.

So if you searched for bise lahore past papers and found nothing official, you were not looking in the wrong place. There is nothing official to find. Lahore students are, in practice, using Gujranwala's and Multan's archives instead — a reasonable workaround given the shared Punjab syllabus, but not the same as your own board's paper.

The rest of Punjab is thinner. Faisalabad publishes model papers, but as individual news announcements linking to Google Drive with no archive page, so they disappear down the news feed within weeks. Sahiwal and Sargodha both resolve to result portals. DG Khan's site offers an examination schedule and a downloads area with no past papers section we could find. Bahawalpur publishes scheme of study and model papers for SSC and HSSC, and is the only one of the four that gives you anything to work with. Note that the www. version of its domain did not resolve for us; the bare domain did.

Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan and AJK

BSEK Karachi runs the matric examinations for Karachi. Its site is a JavaScript application with no ordinary page addresses you can bookmark or share; model papers live under News, filtered to the Model Paper category. That is an accessibility problem for students on cheap phones and weak connections, and it also means search engines cannot index the papers, which is why searches for Karachi board past papers surface third-party sites first. BSEK has been an early mover on paper reform: The News reported in January 2021 that the board issued Science Group model question papers for grades 9 and 10 ahead of other boards, prepared with senior subject teachers, as the new National Scheme of Studies came in with class 9 in 2021 and class 10 in 2022.

BIEK Karachi, which runs the intermediate examinations, publishes model papers including a 2026 set and a separate model paper for the new General Mathematics book. Past question papers as such are not published.

BISE Peshawar publishes SLO-based model papers with marking schemes and tables of specification for HSSC 11th and 12th, eight subjects per year, and a similar set for Grade VIII. Getting the marking scheme alongside the model paper is genuinely useful; most boards give you one or the other.

BBISE Quetta publishes past papers at bbise.edu.pk/PastPapers as two Google Drive folders, labelled past attempted papers for HSSC and SSC. The page does not say which years or subjects are inside, so you have to open the folders. The board's older bbiseq domains did not resolve for us at all; the working domain is bbise.edu.pk.

AJK BISE Mirpur publishes results, gazettes and position-holder lists at ajkbise.net and nothing resembling a past paper.

If you are unsure which board your certificate belongs to or how it maps to another system, the Inter Boards Coordination Commission, the national body under the Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training that handles equivalence and attestation, lists its member boards.

O level past papers: what Cambridge actually gives you free

The O Level and IGCSE situation is the opposite of the Pakistani boards. The archive is enormous, superbly organised and almost entirely closed.

Cambridge International publishes past papers on each syllabus's own page. The address pattern is predictable, so once you know your syllabus code you can go straight there: O Level Mathematics D 4024, O Level Pakistan Studies 2059, IGCSE Mathematics 0580, and so on. The full list is on the Cambridge O Level subjects page.

Here is what you actually get. On the Mathematics D 4024 page on 23 September 2026: June 2024 question papers 11 and 21 with mark schemes, the June 2024 examiner report, and specimen papers with mark schemes for 2018 and 2025. On Pakistan Studies 2059: June 2024 papers 01 and 02 with mark schemes and inserts, the June 2024 examiner report, and 2015 and 2028 specimen papers. That is one live series plus specimens. Cambridge states it plainly on the page: "This is only a selection of our papers. Registered Cambridge International Schools can access a wide range of teaching and learning materials and examination resources through our School Support Hub."

The School Support Hub describes itself as "our secure online site for teachers at Cambridge schools." It is not a student login. If you want the ten-year archive legitimately, the route is your own subject teacher, who almost certainly has it.

Two things worth knowing before you practise with whatever you find.

Examiner reports are the best free thing on the page and nobody downloads them. A mark scheme tells you the right answer. The examiner report tells you what thousands of candidates actually got wrong in that specific paper and why. Read it before you attempt the paper and you will avoid an entire category of error by yourself.

Your paper variant depends on your administrative zone. Cambridge allocates every centre to one of six administrative zones and publishes a separate timetable for each, such as the June 2026 zone 4 timetable. The zone governs your timetable and frequently the variant digit in the component code, which is why papers 21 and 22 of the same syllabus are different papers. We could not verify from Cambridge's own pages which zone Pakistani centres are assigned to, and we are not going to repeat a number we found on a blog. Ask your exams officer, or use Cambridge's zone lookup tool, then practise the variant you will actually sit.

One more thing for Pakistani O Level families: Cambridge states that O Levels are not available for examination in administrative zones 1, 2 and 6, and that from June 2028 it will begin transitioning schools in zones 3 and 5 from Cambridge O Level to the equivalent Cambridge IGCSE qualifications. Whether that affects your school depends on its zone, and it is worth asking now rather than in 2028 — our guide on how to choose a school in Islamabad covers the other questions to put to an admissions office.

The unofficial mirrors, and one specific warning

Everyone doing O Level in Pakistan knows the mirror sites that host the full back catalogue. We are not going to pretend they do not exist, and we are not going to link to them either, because they redistribute Cambridge's copyrighted papers without a licence and we have no way to verify what any particular file is.

We do have one concrete warning, which is the reason this section exists.

On 23 September 2026, gceguide.com — for years the most recommended free O and A Level past papers mirror in the world, and the domain a Pakistani student is most likely to be sent to by an older sibling — returned an HTTP 301 permanent redirect to mindsters.org, which serves an online slot gambling site. Not a past papers site with adverts. A gambling site. We checked the redirect chain directly and it is unambiguous.

Domains lapse and get bought. This is normal and it will happen again to other names, so the general rule matters more than the specific warning: a past papers link a friend gave you two years ago is not a safe link today. Open it yourself before a student does. If a site asks you to install anything, disable an ad blocker, sign in with Google to "unlock" a PDF, or pass through more than one redirect to reach a file, close it.

What past papers cannot do for you

Past papers are free and plentiful, and they are not sufficient on their own. There is exactly one thing they cannot give you, and it is the thing that decides your grade in every written subject: someone competent marking your answer and telling you why it lost marks.

A mark scheme closes this gap for mathematics and for objective sections. It does not close it for a six-mark Pakistan Studies answer, a physics numerical where the method matters, an Urdu essay or an English précis. You can hold your script next to the mark scheme and genuinely not know whether what you wrote counts. Most students in that position mark themselves generously, which is worse than not marking at all, because it converts a real weakness into false confidence right up until the board's marker disagrees.

That is the honest case for a tutor, and it is a narrow one. You do not need a tutor to hand you past papers — they are above, for free. You may need one to mark thirty of your written answers and make you rewrite the weakest ten. If that is your gap, you can browse tutors by subject and board, or read how Scoodemy works first. If your gap is coverage of a whole subject rather than one skill, a structured online academy is usually cheaper per hour than one-to-one, and our comparison of home tutoring and online classes sets out where each one earns its money.

And if your gap is that you have not started, nobody can fix that for you. Buying tuition to compensate for not having opened the book is the most common way families in Pakistan waste money on education.

How to use past papers: what the evidence actually says

Almost every student in Pakistan uses past papers the same way: finish the syllabus, then start "solving papers" in the last six weeks, mostly by reading the question and then reading the answer. That sequence is backwards, and the research on it is unusually clear.

The testing effect

Roediger and Karpicke ran the study that made this concrete. Students read prose passages and then either restudied them or took free-recall tests on them without any feedback, then sat a final test after five minutes, two days or one week.

The numbers are worth stating precisely, because they explain why students prefer the wrong method. At five minutes, restudying won: 81% recall against 75% for testing. At two days it had flipped, 68% for the tested group against 54%. At one week the tested group recalled 56% and the restudy group 42%. In a second experiment, on the one-week test, students who studied once and tested three times recalled 61%, those who studied three times and tested once recalled 56%, and those who only ever studied recalled 40% — while being the most confident group that they would remember it (Roediger and Karpicke, Test-Enhanced Learning, Psychological Science, 2006).

Read the first pair of numbers again. Rereading genuinely does work better, if the exam is in five minutes. It is worse at everything beyond that, and it feels better the whole time. That gap between how a method feels and what it does is the entire reason students abandon past papers for notes in the final fortnight.

What the big review rated highly

Dunlosky and colleagues reviewed ten common study techniques for Psychological Science in the Public Interest and graded each one on how well its benefits generalise across students, materials and real classrooms.

Utility rating Techniques
High Practice testing, distributed practice
Moderate Elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, interleaved practice
Low Summarisation, highlighting, the keyword mnemonic, imagery use for text learning, rereading

They rated practice testing high because "testing effects have been demonstrated across an impressive range of practice-test formats, kinds of material, learner ages, outcome measures, and retention intervals," and distributed practice high because "it works across students of different ages, with a wide variety of materials, on the majority of standard laboratory measures, and over long delays." Their verdict on the low group is blunt: "Most students report rereading and highlighting, yet these techniques do not consistently boost students' performance, so other techniques should be used in their place (e.g., practice testing instead of rereading)" (Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan and Willingham, Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques, PSPI 14(1), 4–58, 2013; see also the journal's own summary).

Note what this does and does not say. It says practice testing beats rereading on the evidence available up to 2013, across a wide range of conditions. It does not say past papers are magic, it does not say notes are worthless, and it is a review of laboratory and classroom studies, not of Pakistani board examinations specifically. What transfers cleanly is the shape of the finding: retrieving is better than re-exposing, and spreading practice out is better than massing it.

Four changes that follow

Start using papers in the first week of the chapter, not the last month of the year. Finish a chapter, then do that chapter's questions across five or six different years' papers before moving on. That one change converts past papers from an assessment into the learning method itself, and it costs nothing.

Attempt before you look. Write the answer with the book shut, then open the key. Look first and you have had a reading experience, not a retrieval one. Writing a wrong answer and correcting it is more useful than reading a right one.

Space the repeats. Come back to a topic at roughly one day, one week, three weeks and two months. It will feel slower than a marathon session, because forgetting a little between attempts is what makes the next attempt work.

Keep an error log and sort it by cause. The highest-value habit in the whole method, and it takes four minutes a day.

Why you lost the mark What it actually means The fix
Did not know it Genuine content gap Go back to the textbook section, not the paper
Knew it, misread the question Comprehension under pressure Underline the command word before writing
Knew it, ran out of time Pacing Time each section separately from now on
Knew it, wrote it badly Presentation against the mark scheme Compare with a topper script or get it marked
Careless slip Usually arithmetic or transcription Build a two-minute end-of-paper check

Five different problems. Five different fixes. Students who log only "wrong answers" treat all five the same way and then wonder why re-solving the same paper does not help.

9th class past papers and 10th class past papers: use them differently

The two years are not equivalent and the same stack of papers should be used two different ways.

In 9th class, the marks are banked: your SSC result is the sum of Part-I and Part-II, so a weak 9th cannot be repaired by a strong 10th. But you are also meeting the content for the first time, so papers are a learning tool, not a rehearsal. Use 9th class past papers chapter by chapter as you finish each chapter, in short untimed sets. A 9th class student doing a full timed paper in October is performing preparation rather than doing it.

In 10th class, the content is largely revision and the constraint is the clock. This is where full timed papers belong, sat end to end with a phone in another room: one a fortnight from about four months out, one a week in the final month. On a Punjab board, Gujranwala's merged files help here precisely because each link gives you the complete paper, objective and subjective together, rather than a fragment.

One note on paper structure. Punjab board students spend a lot of energy hunting for "pairing schemes" that predict which chapters will be paired in which question. The versions circulating on study websites are not board documents, and we could not find an official Punjab board publication of one. What is official, and does the same job better, is the table of specifications published alongside model papers by FBISE and BISE Peshawar. If your board publishes one, use it and ignore the unofficial pairing charts.

Past papers 2nd year: the highest-stakes stack

For intermediate students, 2nd year is where past papers stop being a study aid and start being the main event, because the HSSC Part-II result feeds directly into university merit lists and, for pre-medical students, into the MDCAT aggregate.

BISE Multan's Part-II archive is the deepest available, running from 2015 to the 2026 first annual, and a good number of sessions are published as question papers with answer keys. For Federal Board students, FBISE's HSSC-II page covers roughly the last three or four sessions.

Two cautions specific to 2nd year.

First, check the syllabus before you trust an old paper. Curricula have changed repeatedly since 2020, and a 2017 paper may test a topic that has been removed or use a marking structure that no longer exists. Papers from before your current scheme of studies are useful for practising question types, not for predicting content.

Second, do not let entry test preparation eat your board preparation, or the reverse. They are different papers with different demands: the board paper rewards written method and presentation, the MDCAT rewards speed on multiple-choice questions with no negative marking. Our MDCAT preparation guide sets out the actual weighting, and the MDCAT timeline for FSc students shows how to phase the two so that neither collapses in the last six weeks.

Are past papers enough?

Straight answer: for predicting the shape of an exam, usually yes. For learning the subject, no, and for written subjects, definitely not.

They will teach you the question types, the command words, the mark distribution, the time pressure and which topics the board returns to. They will surface gaps you did not know you had, faster than rereading ever will. And they will calm you down, because most exam panic is unfamiliarity and past papers remove unfamiliarity.

They will not teach you a concept you have never met, tell you whether your written answer would satisfy a marker, or cover a topic added to the syllabus since the last published paper. Nor will they, on their own, stop you repeating the same category of mistake: that takes the error log and somebody willing to be honest about your script.

The combination we see among students who improve sharply is unglamorous: the textbook for concepts, the board's model paper and table of specifications for structure, past papers as the daily practice method from week one, an error log sorted by cause, and one competent adult marking the written work every couple of weeks. Everything else is optional.

Frequently asked questions

Where can I download past papers for free? From your board's own site where one exists: FBISE, BISE Gujranwala, BISE Multan, BISE Rawalpindi or BBISE Quetta. For O Level and IGCSE, the free selection is on each syllabus page at Cambridge International. Everything is free at source; nobody should be charging you for a board's own question paper.

My board does not publish past papers. What now? Three routes, in order. Ask your school, since most keep a physical file going back years and a photocopy costs a few rupees. Use a neighbouring board on the same syllabus, which for Punjab students means Gujranwala or Multan. And use your own board's model paper and table of specifications, which give you the structure even when no past paper exists.

How many past papers should I solve? There is no verified number and anybody quoting one is guessing. A better target than a count: keep going until you can sit a full paper inside the real time limit and your error log stops producing new "did not know it" entries. For most students that means five to ten full papers per subject, plus far more topic-level practice along the way.

Should I memorise past paper answers? No. Boards rotate and reword questions, so memorised answers fail the moment the wording shifts, and memorising skips the retrieval that made the practice worth doing. Memorise the method and the structure of a good answer, not the text of one.

Do past papers repeat? Question types repeat reliably, and individual questions sometimes recur, which is why practising several years of the same chapter is efficient. But "60% of the paper came from past papers" claims, of the kind academies print on banners, are unfalsifiable after the fact and should not change how you study.

Where do I get O level past papers older than last year's? Legitimately, from your subject teacher, who has School Support Hub access as a teacher at a registered Cambridge school. Cambridge publishes only a selection publicly. Mirror sites host more, without a licence, and at least one long-trusted mirror domain now redirects to a gambling site, so check any link yourself before a student uses it.

Are model papers the same as past papers? No, and the difference matters. A past paper was actually sat by candidates. A model paper is the board's own specimen showing the intended format, usually issued when a pattern changes. When a syllabus or pattern has just changed, the model paper is more accurate about the next exam than last year's real paper.

About this guide

This guide was researched and written by the Scoodemy editorial team. Scoodemy is a Pakistani tutoring marketplace that connects students with verified tutors and maintains a directory of schools, colleges and academies, which you can browse through our institutions listings. We do not host past papers and we have no download to sell you, which is why we are able to tell you that BISE Lahore publishes none and that a well-known past papers mirror now points at a gambling site.

Every board link above was opened on 23 September 2026 and described from what was on the page. Where we could not confirm something — which administrative zone Pakistani Cambridge centres sit in, what is inside BBISE Quetta's Drive folders, which years BISE Rawalpindi's unlabelled files cover — we have said so rather than fill the gap with a plausible guess. If you find an error or a dead link, tell us through contact us and we will correct it.

Sources

All links retrieved and verified on 23 September 2026.

Pakistani examination boards

Cambridge International

Research

Reporting

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