Master "plan an experiment" questions for A-Level practicals
Download printable cheat-sheet (CC-BY 4.0)26 Jul 2025, 00:00 Z
Join our Telegram study groupQ: What does Master "plan an experiment" questions for A-Level practicals cover?
A: From 2026 the maximum University Admission Score (UAS) falls from 90 to 70 points.
Are you flustered when you flip your practical paper and see a question on "Plan an experiment" page?
TL;DR
"Planning an experiment" questions compress a week-long research cycle into 75 anxious minutes.
These high-mark questions expect novices to think creatively and technically and provide almost no scaffolding. Yet, with the right support, they are a uniquely powerful way to cultivate authentic scientific reasoning.
1. The planning-question conundrum
1a. What exactly is being assessed?
In Cambridge AS/A-Level Physics Paper 5, Question 1 alone is worth 15 marks and requires candidates to propose apparatus, method, analysis and evaluation from scratch'.
1b. Why it feels brutally hard
| Pain-point | How it bites |
| Cognitive-load overload | Students must juggle equipment choice, variable control, measurement precision and error analysis simultaneously — a textbook recipe for split-attention overload'. |
| Performance anxiety | More than half of secondary-school science students report heightened anxiety during practical exams'. |
| Novice-expert gap | Teachers themselves cite uncertainty about “correct answers” and time costs as barriers to running open-ended labs'. |
| Exam culture | High-stakes grading is argued to encourage “cook-book” labs and may discourage risk-taking, although direct causal evidence for A-level contexts is limited'. |
2. Why keep planning questions at all?
Open-ended practicals mirror real research, obliging learners to articulate hypotheses, design experimental variables and critique their own methods.
