The only honest way to find out where you stand.

AAPT publishes each year’s exam together with its answers and solutions once the cycle is finished. That archive is the single most useful preparation resource that exists for this contest, and it is free.

A past paper tells you something no syllabus can: where your own physics course stops and the contest keeps going. Most students discover that gap is not where they expected — and the sooner they find it, the more time there is to close it.

The archive

Nineteen years, ready to send

The listed collection covers 2007–2025. AAPT has also released the 2026 paper; inclusion in our assembled pack still needs confirmation. Ask which years are currently available; worked solutions cover selected years only.— scan the code and tell us which ones you want, and we send them free.

What exists

What AAPT actually publishes

Three different things, and it is worth knowing which is which.

Material	What it is
The exam	The paper as sat. For 2026, AAPT notes that unlike the version inside EdVistas, Division I and Division II appear on the same document — so compare against the answer key rather than assuming your division’s numbering.
Answers and solutions	Published alongside the exam. The solutions, not just the key, are the part worth reading — they show the intended route, which is usually shorter than the one you found.
The equation sheet	The sheet handed to students, plus an annotated version explaining what each relation represents. The annotated one is a study aid; it is not what you get in the exam.

Released papers only

This site does not publish, host or pass on current-cycle questions, reconstructions assembled from memory, or answer keys before AAPT releases them. The line is publication by AAPT. Anyone offering you this year’s paper during the exam window is harming the students who have not yet sat — see academic integrity.

What we can send you

Our listed collection: 2007–2025; ask about 2026 availability

Nineteen cycles of past papers with their answers, collected in one place so you are not hunting them down a year at a time.

Range

2007to 2025

Nineteen cycles of papers, with answers.

Cost

Freeon request

Ask us and we will send them. There is nothing to sign up for.

Also included

3study aids

Key-point notes, high-frequency vocabulary, and recommended textbooks.

The current cycle comes from AAPT directly

The most recent exam, with its official answers and solutions, is published by AAPT on its own Current Exam page — go there for it rather than to us. What we hold is the back catalogue, which is harder to assemble and is the part most students actually want.

Method

How to work through one properly

Most students waste their first two past papers by treating them as homework. They are diagnostics, and they only work under exam conditions.

Sit the first one cold, and timed

Forty questions, forty-five minutes, one sitting, with the real equation sheet and nothing else. No pausing to look something up. The number you get is not the point — the point is the honest baseline, and you only get one chance at a genuinely cold paper.

Mark it, then sort the errors into three piles

Questions you got wrong because you had never met the topic. Questions you could have done but ran out of time for. And questions you knew and still got wrong. These are three completely different problems, and mixing them together is why preparation stalls. The third pile is the most valuable and the one most people skip past.

Read the published solution even for the ones you got right

At 67.5 seconds a question, being right slowly is nearly as costly as being wrong. The published solutions show the intended route; if yours took three times as long, that is a finding worth having.

Close the topic gaps before sitting the next paper

Working through six papers back to back mostly teaches you that you have the same gaps six times. Fix what the first paper exposed, then use the second to check whether it took.

Practise the decision, not just the physics

The distinctive skill this contest tests is deciding quickly which relation applies and committing to it. That is trainable: give yourself sixty seconds a question on a batch of twenty and accept that some will be wrong. Learning to move on is part of the exam.

Reading the difficulty

What a past paper will and will not tell you

It will tell you

Where your course stops

The paper reaches across mechanics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, optics and modern physics in a single sitting. Almost every student meets at least one strand they have not been taught. Finding out which one is the whole value of the exercise.

It will not tell you

What you will score this year

Papers vary between cycles, and so does the field you are ranked against — awards are decided per region and per division, not globally. A past-paper score is a diagnostic of your preparation, not a prediction of an award.

One further caution about difficulty: the 2026 cycle produced an unusually large number of very high scores — enough that AAPT published no top-100 list and instead recognised every student scoring 38, 39 or 40. Do not read one year’s outcome as the permanent standard in either direction. The results archive gives the fuller picture.

Get the papers

Scan, tell us the years, and they’re yours

Add our advisor on WeChat, say which years you want — or just say “all of them” — and we send the papers with their answers, free. Key-point notes, high-frequency vocabulary and recommended textbooks come with them.

Stuck on a specific question later? Send the year and the question number and we will talk it through. That is free too.