After every exam session, the Principal Examiner writes a report detailing exactly what students did well and where they failed miserably. This document is a goldmine.
1. Spotting the Traps
The Examiner Report will explicitly state things like: 'A common misconception in Question 4 was that students confused mitosis with meiosis.' If you read this, you know exactly what trap Cambridge likes to set, and you can avoid it in your own exam.
2. Understanding "Vague" Answers
Examiners hate vague answers. The report will often provide examples of answers that received zero marks because they were 'too vague'. For instance, in Geography, saying 'build a wall' to stop flooding gets zero marks, while 'construct hard-engineering defenses such as levees' gets full marks.
3. How to Use Them Efficiently
You do not have time to read every examiner report for the last 10 years. Instead, when you are doing a past paper on RevisionGrid and you get a specific question completely wrong, pull up the Examiner Report for that specific year and read the paragraph dedicated to that specific question.