ExamPro and AI Marking: Building, Scanning and Marking GCSE and A-Level Papers

ExamPro builds the exam. GradeDrive marks it. If your department already uses ExamPro to pull together GCSE or A-level papers, this is the full path from building the paper to getting it back to students with AI marking and a teacher's review on every mark: what ExamPro is, what to save and how, how to scan a class set in one trip to reprographics, and what to actually upload.

What is ExamPro?

ExamPro is AQA's exam preparation tool, also offered through OxfordAQA, built around a question bank of thousands of past GCSE and A-level questions mapped to current specifications, complete with mark schemes and examiner comments. Instead of writing a mock paper from scratch or photocopying together pages from old past papers, a teacher searches the bank by topic, assessment objective or qualification, drags the questions they want into a paper, and ExamPro assembles a clean question paper alongside its matching mark scheme.

It's a Science-led tool first (the GCSE Science package alone has over 7,400 mapped questions) but it also covers other AQA subjects, and a newer Onscreen+ option adds auto-marked questions for formative use. For departments that have standardised on AQA, it's usually the fastest route to a properly structured mock or topic test.

How many teachers actually use ExamPro, and what the alternatives look like

ExamPro isn't a niche tool. In its own 2025 subscriber survey of 3,112 teachers, 97% said they'd recommend it, 96.6% said it reduces their workload, and usage peaked at 18,000 uses in a single day that year. That scale is why "how do I get a paper out of ExamPro and into AI marking" is a real, recurring question rather than an edge case.

ExamPro is AQA's tool specifically. If your department sits under a different board, the equivalent exists there too:

• Exam Wizard – Pearson Edexcel's version: a free bank of past Edexcel questions, mark schemes and examiners' reports, covering GCSE, International GCSE, AS/A level, BTEC and Functional Skills, accessed with a free EdexcelOnline or QMA account.
• ExamBuilder – Cambridge OCR's version: a free test-building platform for staff at OCR centres, with its own question bank and the option to add cover pages so a built paper looks and feels like a real exam.

Everything in this post about building the paper in ExamPro and preparing it for AI marking in GradeDrive applies in the same shape if your department uses Exam Wizard or ExamBuilder instead: the board-specific tool builds the paper and the mark scheme, and the scanning and marking steps that follow are identical regardless of which one you used.

How to make an exam paper on ExamPro

1. Log in and pick your qualification. Select the subject, tier and specification you're building for (GCSE, A-level or KS3).
2. Search the question bank. Filter by topic, sub-topic, assessment objective or difficulty. ExamPro's automatic question selector can also suggest a set based on the filters you set, which is a fast starting point for a topic test.
3. Build the paper. Drag the questions you want into the paper, reorder them, and set the total marks and time allowance. You can build anything from a five-minute topic check to a full mock paper.
4. Export the question paper and the mark scheme separately. This is the step that matters for everything that follows. ExamPro gives you two documents: the question paper itself, and the matching mark scheme with examiner comments. Export and save them as two separate PDFs, not one merged file.

How to mark ExamPro papers on GradeDrive

This is where the two separate PDFs from ExamPro earn their keep.

Save the mark scheme as its own PDF. The mark scheme ExamPro exports, with its point-based criteria or level-of-response bands, is exactly what GradeDrive needs to mark against. It's the only document GradeDrive reads for marking criteria, so keep it as a clean, standalone file rather than appended to the question paper.

Save the question paper as its own PDF too, but for your own records. GradeDrive doesn't take a question-paper upload: the only two things you upload are the mark scheme and the students' completed scripts. The question paper is what you print and hand out, and what your department keeps on file for standardisation and moderation. Keeping it as a separate PDF from day one means you're not hunting through a merged file later when a student asks what question 7 actually said.

Upload the mark scheme once, then upload the scanned scripts. Create a new assessment in GradeDrive, upload the ExamPro mark scheme PDF, then upload the scanned class set. GradeDrive reads each student's answer against the mark scheme, criterion by criterion, and a teacher reviews every suggested mark before anything is recorded. It isn't tied to AQA specifically. Upload whichever mark scheme you've got (AQA, Edexcel, OCR or WJEC) and GradeDrive marks against that.

What about a school's own cover sheet, or ExamPro's default cover page? When we say GradeDrive needs no cover sheets, we mean the special, unique-per-student sheets some other AI marking tools require, often carrying a barcode or QR code tied to that one student, generated and printed before a single page is scanned. GradeDrive doesn't need any of that. A school's own front-cover template, or the default cover page ExamPro adds to an exported paper, is a different thing, and neither is made by GradeDrive, nor does it need to be. Auto-split is cover-page agnostic: it finds the boundary between one student's script and the next by comparing pages, not by reading whatever's printed on the cover. Whichever cover your school or ExamPro already uses works without any change.

After the exam: slicing the spine and scanning in bulk

Once students have finished the paper, most departments aren't scanning booklets one at a time. The quickest route, and the one most reprographics departments already have the kit for:

1. Slice off the spine. If the booklets are stapled or bound, guillotine or slice off the spine so you're left with loose pages. This is what lets a photocopier's automatic document feeder pull every sheet through without jamming.
2. Scan the whole class set in one pass. Load the loose pages into the photocopier's feeder and scan the entire set as a single multi-page PDF. There's no need to separate students into individual files first. GradeDrive's auto-split handles finding the boundary between one student's script and the next.
3. Upload the single PDF. One file, the whole class, straight into the assessment you created.

Best scanner settings to keep file sizes down

A 30-student class set of multi-page scripts can get large fast, and a slow upload over a school network is the last thing you want after a busy exam day. Two settings matter most on a reprographics photocopier:

• Grayscale, not colour. Exam scripts are pen or pencil on white paper. Colour scanning roughly triples the file size for no benefit to the marking.
• Around 200 to 300 dpi. High enough to keep handwriting and diagram detail legible, far below the 600+ dpi settings meant for photographs or artwork, which produce enormous files for no gain here.

Grayscale at that resolution keeps even a long class set comfortably inside GradeDrive's upload limit, and it uploads and processes faster at the other end too.

How accurate is AI marking on an ExamPro-built paper?

The marking step works the same whether the paper came from ExamPro, Exam Wizard, ExamBuilder or a paper your department wrote from scratch, because GradeDrive marks against whatever mark scheme you upload rather than against a specific board's template. GradeDrive officially covers Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Maths at GCSE and A-level (including Combined Science and Further Maths), with English still experimental. Across summer 2026, 99.2% of marks survived a teacher's review unchanged over roughly 216,000 marks and 2,300 submissions, our own production figure, not an independent benchmark. Two separate case studies went further and tested GradeDrive against official AQA mark schemes directly, finding a quadratic-weighted kappa of 0.885 on GCSE Physics and 0.864 on A-level Maths. Full detail and the limits of both numbers are on our accuracy page.

Common questions

Does GradeDrive work with ExamPro mark schemes specifically? Yes. ExamPro's mark schemes are the same point-based and level-of-response structure GradeDrive is built to read, since AQA's format is one of the four boards (AQA, Edexcel, OCR, WJEC) it already handles.

Can I use GradeDrive if my department uses Exam Wizard or ExamBuilder instead of ExamPro? Yes. The board doesn't matter to GradeDrive. Upload whichever mark scheme your paper-building tool exported, and the marking and review process is identical.

Do I need to upload the question paper to GradeDrive? No. Only the mark scheme and the scanned student scripts get uploaded. Keep the question paper as its own PDF for printing and departmental records.

Does my school's existing cover sheet, or ExamPro's default cover page, need to change for auto-split to work? No. "No cover sheets required" refers to the special, unique-per-student barcoded or QR-coded sheets some AI marking tools need generated and printed per student. A school's own template or ExamPro's default cover page is different: neither is made by GradeDrive, and both work as-is, because auto-split finds the boundary between scripts by comparing pages, not by reading what's on the cover.

What's the best way to scan a class set after an ExamPro mock? Slice off the spine so the pages are loose, then scan the whole class set in one pass through a reprographics photocopier's automatic feeder, in grayscale at around 200 to 300 dpi. Upload the result as a single PDF alongside the mark scheme.

Is this AI marking, or an AI examiner replacing the teacher? It's AI marking with a teacher still deciding every mark. GradeDrive suggests a mark for each answer against the scheme you uploaded and shows its reasoning; a teacher reviews every suggestion before it's recorded, and can change any of them. Nothing is an automatic, final mark until a teacher has seen it.

Related reading

• AI marking for GCSE and A-level exam papers
• AI marking for GCSE
• AI marking for A-level
• Exam marking software for UK schools
• How GradeDrive is different: no barcodes, no cover sheets, just upload and go
• Mock exam season and the marking pile
• Our accuracy numbers, in full