AQA A-Level Design and Technology Past Papers & Mark Schemes

Paper 1 technical questions require precision in describing material properties — and the level of precision required increases significantly from GCSE. At A-Level, describing steel as 'strong' is insufficient; distinguishing between tensile strength, compressive strength, shear strength, and impact toughness — and explaining why each matters for different applications — is what the mark scheme rewards. For each major material category, know the specific mechanical properties (strength, hardness measured by Brinell or Vickers scales, ductility, malleability, elasticity, toughness), thermal properties (conductivity, expansion coefficient), and electrical properties where relevant. For composites and smart materials, understand the mechanism by which their combined properties emerge from their constituent materials — why carbon fibre reinforced polymer has high specific stiffness, or how shape memory alloys exploit crystallographic phase transitions. For manufacturing process questions, the key evaluative dimension is the relationship between production volume and cost structure. Injection moulding has very high tooling costs (tens of thousands of pounds for precision moulds) but extremely low per-unit costs at high volumes — making it appropriate for mass production but economically unviable for one-off or low-volume manufacture. Sand casting has low tooling costs but labour-intensive finishing. CNC machining offers high precision and flexibility but relatively high unit costs. Examiners test this analytical dimension directly — questions ask why a specific process was chosen for a specific context, and responses that describe the process without analysing its cost and volume trade-offs score in the middle rather than the top band. For Paper 2's sustainability questions — which appear in almost every examination — lifecycle assessment provides the analytical framework. Lifecycle assessment evaluates environmental impact across the full lifecycle of a product: raw material extraction (mining, harvesting, energy intensive processing), manufacturing (energy consumption, water use, waste generation), distribution (transport modes and distances), use phase (energy consumption, maintenance requirements, consumables), and end of life (recyclability, landfill, incineration, composting). When evaluating a specific product against sustainability criteria, quantify where possible ('aluminium requires approximately 13 kWh of energy per kg to produce from bauxite, but recycling requires only 0.65 kWh per kg — a 95% energy saving') and identify specific design decisions that could improve lifecycle performance at each stage. For the NEA portfolio, the design development section is where many students lose the most marks. Examiners are looking for genuine iteration — ideas that changed, approaches that were rejected on the basis of specific testing or feedback, refinements that improved functionality or manufacture. A portfolio that presents only the final, polished design as if it emerged fully formed suggests the student designed in a linear rather than iterative way, and scores less well than a portfolio showing a genuinely exploratory and responsive design process.