About Exam Bank
Who we are
Exam Bank is a free educational tool built for South African students and teachers. We are a small team of developers and educators who grew frustrated with how hard it is to find specific past paper questions when studying for NSC exams. Rather than complain about the problem, we built a solution and made it free for everyone.
We are based in South Africa and built this tool with the South African curriculum in mind. Every decision — which topics to include, which papers to source, how to label and organise questions — is guided by the CAPS curriculum and the reality of how students and teachers actually prepare for exams.
The problem we are solving
Past NSC exam papers are widely available online, but they are organised by year and paper — not by topic. If you want to practise Newton's Laws questions, you have to open paper after paper, skip through unrelated sections, and manually collect the questions you need. Across multiple years and provinces, this can take an hour before you have even started studying.
Teachers face exactly the same problem. Putting together a topic-focused practice set for a class means downloading dozens of PDFs, hunting through each one, and then manually compiling questions. It is time-consuming work that has nothing to do with actually teaching.
Exam Bank eliminates that. Every question in our database is tagged by topic, grade, year, paper, month, and source — so you can go directly to what you need.
How it works
Each past paper in our database has been processed page by page. We extract the text from every page, classify it by CAPS topic using a combination of keyword matching and machine-learning similarity scoring, and store each page as a searchable record linked to a high-quality image of the original question.
When you open the Physics browser and select a topic — say, "Doppler Effect" for Grade 12 — Exam Bank instantly returns every matching question page from our database. 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.
No login is required. No account is needed. The tool works on any device with a web browser, including low-end phones on mobile data.
What is in the database
Exam Bank currently covers Physics (Physical Sciences Paper 1 and 2) for Grades 10, 11, and 12. Our database includes both NSC national papers and provincial papers from multiple South African provinces, spanning several years of past exams.
All CAPS Physics 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. Instead of spending time hunting through papers, they spend that time on what matters — helping students understand the material.
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.
Our commitment
Exam Bank is free to use and will remain free. We do not charge for access, we do not put questions behind a paywall, and we do not require an account or email address. Quality exam preparation resources should be available to every South African learner, regardless of their school's resources or their family's income.
We are continuously adding more papers to the database and plan to expand to additional subjects. If you have feedback, a question, or a paper you think we should add, you are welcome to contact us.
The South African curriculum context
South African schools follow the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS), which prescribes specific topics for each grade and subject. The National Senior Certificate (NSC) examinations, written in Grade 12, are the benchmark qualification for school-leavers and a key factor in university admission.
Past NSC papers are published by the Department of Basic Education and are an essential study resource. However, because they are released as complete multi-topic papers rather than as topic-sorted question banks, students have historically had to do a lot of manual work to use them effectively. Exam Bank exists to remove that barrier.