Somewhere in every biology department there is a spreadsheet nobody admits to, tracking which past papers are still clean. Which cohort has seen May 2024 TZ2. Which paper is being saved for the mocks, guarded like the good biscuits. Set the wrong one in October and you've burned the mock for a hundred students.

The 2025 syllabus made this worse, not better. New course, new paper formats, and a grand total of a couple of exam sessions' worth of real papers in existence. You cannot ration your way out of that. There isn't enough to ration.

a3f2c1 seed a3f2c1 · regenerates the same paper

So I built the thing I kept wishing existed: a practice paper maker. It's live on this site now, tab 08. Free, no login, works on the photocopier-adjacent laptop in your prep room.

What it does.

Pick a level, tick some topics, choose a format, print. It assembles a paper at real exam lengths: a Paper 1A (30 multiple choice at SL, 40 at HL), a Paper 1B with four data-based questions, a full Paper 2 with a data-based opener, short-answer section and extended-response choice, or a plain topic quiz when you just want twenty marks on C1.2 before Friday. Markschemes come along for the ride, in proper markscheme dialect: semicolons, alternatives, "award converse", the lot.

The bit I use most: every paper has a seed. Share the link and it regenerates the identical paper on any machine. Set it as homework and the whole class sits the same questions; reroll the seed and you've got a parallel version for the resit, or for the student whose eyes wandered.

And for teachers who want control rather than luck, there's a pick mode: open any subtopic, preview every question with its markscheme, and choose exactly the ones you want. Your paper, your call. A coverage page shows where the bank runs deep and where it's still thin.

Every question is original. That's the point.

Nothing in the bank is lifted from a real paper. Not adapted, not lightly reworded. Every question is written from the syllabus statements themselves, which is both the legally sensible move (the IB owns its questions) and, I'd argue, the pedagogically honest one. What students actually need to rehearse is the shape of the exam: the command terms, the mark weightings, the data-response rhythm, the extended-response stamina. The shape isn't copyrighted. I bang on about playing the game, and format familiarity is most of the game.

Writing from the statements has a side benefit: the obscure corners get questions too. The bank knows that chloroplasts are plastids, that phloem sieve tubes politely disagree with cell theory (A2.2), that titin is the spring in your sarcomere (B3.3). Real papers love those corners. Now your practice papers do too.

An honest word about the sign.

There's an under-construction sign on the page and it's doing real work. As I write this the bank holds around 760 questions and 14 extended-response themes, spread across all 40 subtopics from A1.1 Water to D4.3 Climate change. That's enough to generate full papers at every format and level without repeats becoming a problem. It is not, yet, the depth of two decades of past papers, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. The bank grows most weeks. The papers you generate will keep getting better behind your back.

new on the site
Practice paper maker
SL & HL · Paper 1A, 1B, 2 or topic quiz · markschemes included · print or share a link.

If you teach this course: generate a paper, set it, and tell me where it creaks. Which subtopics feel thin, which markschemes are too generous, which questions your students shredded. DM me on LinkedIn: the bank grows fastest where teachers point.

The past papers are finite. The syllabus isn't going anywhere. Write from the statements and the supply stops being the bottleneck.