About Exam Bank
Who is behind it
Exam Bank is a free tool for South African students and teachers. I'm the developer behind it, and I built it because finding a specific past paper question for NSC revision took far longer than it should.
I'm based in South Africa, and the site follows the CAPS curriculum. Which topics are listed, which papers I add and how questions are labelled all come from CAPS and from the way students and teachers actually prepare for exams.
Why I built it
Past NSC papers are easy to find online, but they are sorted by year and paper, not by topic. To practise Newton's Laws you have to open paper after paper, skip the sections you don't need and copy out the questions you do. Across a few years and provinces, that can take an hour before you have started studying.
Teachers have the same problem. A topic-focused practice set for a class means downloading dozens of PDFs, searching each one and pasting the questions together. That is time taken away from teaching.
On Exam Bank, every question is already tagged by topic, grade, year, paper, month and source, so you can go straight to what you need.
How it works
Each past paper is processed page by page. The text on every page is extracted and matched to a CAPS topic, using keyword matching and similarity to pages I have already checked, and each page is stored with an image of the original question.
When you open the question browser and choose a subject and topic (say, "Doppler Effect" for Grade 12), Exam Bank shows every matching question page. You can narrow the results further by year, paper number, month, or province. Clicking any result opens a full-screen viewer where you can page through the question and its memorandum side by side.
Every question is readable without signing in, and it will stay that way. The tool works on any device with a web browser, including low-end phones on mobile data.
A free account is optional. It gives you somewhere to keep your work: bookmark questions, save a practice set and come back to it, track what you have worked through, and filter by the difficulty other learners have rated. Nothing that is readable signed out is ever put behind it.
What is in the database
Exam Bank covers Physical Sciences (Paper 1 and 2) for Grades 10, 11 and 12, drawn from NSC national papers and provincial papers from Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo, Mpumalanga and North West, spanning 2021 to 2026.
Mathematics covers Grades 10, 11 and 12, and every CAPS topic is listed and explained on the Maths topics page. The question bank behind it is newer and still filling: three papers so far, one per grade, from KwaZulu-Natal and the NSC. Physical Sciences is where the depth is today, and Mathematics grows with every paper added.
All CAPS Physical Sciences topics are covered across the three grades:
- Grade 10: Vectors and scalars, Motion in one dimension, Mechanical energy, Transverse waves, Longitudinal waves, Electromagnetic radiation, Electrostatics, Electric circuits, and more
- Grade 11: Newton's laws, Electrostatics, Electromagnetism, Electric circuits, Intermolecular forces, Ideal gases, and more
- Grade 12: Newton's laws, Momentum and impulse, Vertical projectile motion, Work/energy/power, Doppler Effect, Electric circuits, Electrodynamics, Optical phenomena, Organic molecules, Chemical equilibrium, and more
Each question page is linked to its corresponding memorandum page, so you always have the model answer available alongside the question.
Who it is for
Students use Exam Bank to practise specific topics they are struggling with, without wasting time paging through full papers. Before a test or exam, a student can pull up every past question on a single topic and work through them in one focused session.
Teachers and tutors use Exam Bank to build practice sets and topic-focused worksheets quickly. They spend less time hunting through papers and more time teaching.
Parents helping their children study can use Exam Bank to find relevant practice questions without needing to know which paper or year a particular topic appeared in.
Free, and staying free
Exam Bank is free and will stay free. There is no charge for access, no question sits behind a paywall, and you do not need an account to read any question.
I keep adding papers, and Mathematics is the first subject beyond Physical Sciences. If you have feedback, a question, or a paper you think should be added, get in touch.
CAPS and the NSC
South African schools follow CAPS, the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement, which sets the topics for each grade and subject. Past NSC papers are published whole, one paper per sitting, so Exam Bank splits them up by those CAPS topics.