PastPaperPrep vs PMT: Free PDFs or Custom Practice Sets?

The short answer: free PDFs versus less admin

This comparison is not “which site has more questions?” PMT is excellent at making a large set of downloadable resources easy to find. PastPaperPrep is built around a different job: turning a known need such as “IB Physics HL electricity, short questions, recent sessions” into a bounded practice set.

If you are happy to open several PDFs, extract relevant questions, and keep track of mark schemes, PMT may be all you need. If that setup work is the reason you keep postponing topical practice, PastPaperPrep’s paid workflow can be rational. You are paying for retrieval, metadata, selection, and set building, not for a promise of better grades.

What PMT does unusually well for free

PMT’s main past-paper page says it provides AQA, CAIE, Edexcel, OCR, Eduqas, and WJEC past papers and mark schemes for GCSEs, IGCSEs, A-levels, and International A-levels. Its maths revision page links revision notes, cheatsheets, worksheets, questions by topic, model solutions, and past papers by exam board.

That organisation is its strength. A student can identify the board, open the relevant subject page, download a paper, attempt it offline, and check the mark scheme. PMT also offers material beyond original exam papers, including worksheets and practice resources. That is enough for many revision plans, especially when the goal is a timed full paper rather than a highly specific topical drill.

PMT’s free status does not mean every linked file has identical provenance or current-spec relevance. Read the page labels, check the exam board and specification, and treat practice papers and older-spec material as different from a current official paper.

Where PastPaperPrep earns its price

PastPaperPrep currently covers live banks: Cambridge IGCSE Mathematics, Additional Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Co-ordinated Sciences and Economics, plus IB Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, Biology and Economics at HL and SL. Its proposition is narrower than PMT’s overall resource catalogue, but deeper for the supported banks: questions can be narrowed by course, topic, year, paper, marks, and other available metadata, then selected into a printable set.

That matters when a full paper gives you a diagnosis but not enough repetition. You can practise the same weak skill across several real questions, review the mark scheme or answer, and later remove the topic label in a mixed set. The value is speed and consistency. A learner who only needs two papers a month may not recover the subscription cost in saved time; a tutor or busy student assembling repeated targeted sets may.

PastPaperPrep does not turn practice into teaching automatically. It cannot replace learning the method, reading examiner feedback, or checking whether a source matches your course. It simply makes the selection stage more deliberate.

Pricing and access boundaries

PastPaperPrep currently lists one bank at $6 per month or $48 per year. The two-to-five-bank tier starts at $10 per month for two banks, plus $4 per additional bank, or $84 per year for two, plus $36 per additional bank. Six or more banks are $25 per month or $216 per year. Complete older exam years are available free. Confirm the live pricing and the exact free inventory before subscribing, because prices and access rules can change.

PMT has the simpler price answer: the core site is free to browse and download. That makes it the obvious first stop when budget is the binding constraint. PastPaperPrep becomes more defensible when the cost of manual selection is the binding constraint and the required course sits inside its 19-bank scope.

Which workflow should you use?

Choose PMT for a timed paper, a mark scheme, a broad board-specific resource search, or free worksheets and topic pages. Choose PastPaperPrep for a narrow diagnostic, a set with a chosen question count or mark range, or a printable worksheet that combines selected real questions without copying them manually from multiple PDFs.

A sensible hybrid is free-first. Use PMT or official board materials for a complete paper. Mark it and write down the precise gap. Use PastPaperPrep only if you need many more questions on that gap and its supported filters save meaningful time. Finish with a mixed or timed paper from PMT. That sequence uses each service for what it actually does well.

The verdict without marketing language

PMT is excellent and free for downloadable organised resources. It wins if you value breadth, price, and control over your own files. PastPaperPrep charges because it removes more of the assembly work for a defined set of IGCSE and IB banks. It wins if granular topical filtering and custom printable sets are worth paying for.

Neither service is a guarantee of a result, and neither should be judged by how many PDFs you collect. Judge the workflow by whether you attempt questions independently, review the first failed step, and can solve the skill later in a mixed context.