IG Career Articles
Examiner Reports: The IGCSE Teacher's Secret Weapon
Examiner reports reveal exactly how examiners think and where students lose marks. Here is how professional IGCSE teachers mine them.
What an examiner report is
After every exam session, the board publishes a Principal Examiner's report for each paper: a question-by-question account of what candidates did well, where they lost marks, and what the examiners wish teachers had done differently. It is the closest thing to sitting inside the marking room — and most teachers never read it.
Turning reports into teaching decisions
Read the last three sessions' reports for your paper and extract three lists: recurring misconceptions ('candidates confused evaporation with boiling'), mark-losing habits ('answers lacked units', 'candidates ignored the command word'), and examiner preferences ('credit was given for annotated diagrams'). Those three lists should directly reshape your lesson emphasis, your homework design and the phrasing you drill.
Inside IG Career's live subject track, examiner reports are treated as core material alongside past papers and mark schemes — because they reveal exactly how the examiners think.