We take one VPR maths paper and go through it from the first question to the last. The point isn’t to show the solutions — any workbook has those — but to mark the places where students lose marks consistently, year after year.
The VPR isn’t a race. Almost every mark lost in our mock papers is not “didn’t know” but “didn’t read to the end”.
The first third of the paper usually goes by without losses. Trouble starts where a table or chart appears in the question: the data is all there, but the question is about a different row from the one the student worked out first. The second typical trap is percentage problems, where “a percentage of a number” gets mixed up with “a number from its percentage”.
[Draft — a full question-by-question walkthrough will be added after the next mock exam]