Practice Tests vs Exam Papers: How Education Sittings Work

The Education hub has two shelves. Practice is first: drill the bank, or a competition, at your own pace. Exams is second: real past papers, sat the way the exam runs.

That split is not decoration. A practice sitting is a slice you configure — size, band, topics, timer, feedback. An exam sitting, when one exists, would carry the paper’s own length and clock. Confusing the two is how people arrive looking for a SAT mock, find a 20-question General Math drill, and decide the product is broken.

Live today, the catalogue is Practice. General Math, four languages, and Math Kangaroo. The Exams shelf currently has no live named qualifications. SAT, GCSE, TOEFL, IELTS, Abitur, and E8 are not available. This article is how a practice sitting actually runs, and what the empty Exams shelf means so you do not plan around it.

Practice shelf: the live catalogue

Practice is the common case. You do not have to name a country and a paper before you can start. You pick a test card, narrow the pool, press Start practice.

The six live cards:

• General Math — the whole maths bank, grades 3–12, no exam-family pin.
• General English, French, German, Spanish — CEFR A1–C2, four skills (vocabulary, grammar, reading, writing). No listening, no speaking, no audio.
• Math Kangaroo — real past-paper items, still a Practice card. People drill Kangaroo. They do not sit it like a leaving exam.

Kangaroo is on Practice on purpose. Filing it under Exams because the items came from real papers produced the wrong card: a timer and a Short/Normal/Full length next to a neighbour that offered 10 / 20 / 60 and Start practice. Same choice, two UIs. One card shape for one kind of activity.

General Math can serve Kangaroo items when the grade and topic filter match. That is the bank, not a second contest. We are not affiliated with official Math Kangaroo / Kangourou sans Frontières.

Languages are a CEFR-shaped bank, not Cambridge, DELF, Goethe-Institut, DELE, or ÖSD. No official affiliation.

What Education is, versus For Me and IQ, is Education on My Path.

Exams shelf: no live named qualifications

The Exams hint on the hub is honest: “Real past papers, sat the way the exam runs.” The shelf is built for that. It is not currently filled with live tests.

SAT, GCSE, TOEFL, IELTS, Abitur, and E8 are not available. Physics is not available. If you need one of those as a timed mock with the real paper’s structure, this is not that product today. Saying “coming soon” as if a date existed would be a different kind of lie. Off tests can show as locked / coming-soon cards with a Notify me control. That is a demand signal, not a catalogue. A locked card is not a sitting you can start.

When the Exams shelf has nothing live, the page does not invent a mock so the section looks busy. Empty is the true state. Practice first, then real papers — when there are real papers. The hub walkthrough is the user-level version of the same order.

Do not treat a 60-question General Math sitting in exam-mode timer as a GCSE paper. It is a long practice drill with a clock. Useful. Not the qualification.

An exam card, when a family is live, would not offer 10 / 20 / 60 as the main choice. It would carry the paper’s own length, the paper’s own timer, Short / Normal / Full if that family has those cuts, and a start control that means “sit this paper,” not “slice the bank.” That is a different job. Until a family is On in the public catalogue, that card is not something you can press. Locked / coming-soon tiles may still appear for Off tests; they are not a sitting, and they are not SAT-as-live. Notify me records interest. It does not start a mock.

If you only needed the drill, you are not missing a hidden second catalogue below the fold. Scroll to topics and mastery after you have sat once. The Exams shelf will still be the Exams shelf.

One sitting, one band

Every practice sitting is one grade or one CEFR level. The card will not mix them.

Maths labels the axis Grade: 3–4, 5–6, 7–8, 9–10, 11–12. Languages label it Level: A1–C2. Same machinery, different name, because calling CEFR a “grade” reads as a mistake to anyone learning a language.

You can tick several grades on the card. That does not mean “serve them all.” At start, the card rolls one of the ticked bands. The API refuses a multi-grade pool with grade_required. The reason is not pedantry. Kangaroo’s complexity is a task-number band — first third, middle third, last third — identical across ages. A mixed-grade “easy” sitting would hand a nine-year-old a school-leaver’s warm-up, or the reverse. Why grade bands matter in online practice tests is the full product decision.

If you want two bands, sit twice. The mastery bars will still update per topic. Mixing would make those bars unreadable.

Size: 10, 20, or 60

Practice lengths are 10, 20, and 60. Default is 20: long enough to mean something, short enough to finish.

The card will not let you pick a length the current filters cannot fill. The deliverable size is the smallest candidate pool among the grades you might roll, not the sum of every ticked grade. If the shallowest band only has 14 items that match, 20 and 60 mute. That is the card being honest before you start, instead of dying at question 15.

Use 10 when you are probing one topic after a bad sitting. Use 20 as the default weekly drill. Use 60 when you want a longer stretch with the exam-mode timer, knowing it is still a practice slice, not a named paper.

There is no “until the bank is empty” mode. A sitting ends.

Timer, feedback, navigation

Inside the sitting, three controls change how it feels. None of them change the bank.

Timer: off, relaxed, or exam mode. Off is a study session. Relaxed is a nudge. Exam mode is the clock you will actually meet on a paper, used here as pressure training, not as proof you sat GCSE.

Feedback: immediate, or review at the end. Immediate is how you learn a new cell — B1 grammar, grade 7–8 algebra — because the correction lands while the item is still in working memory. Review at the end is how you simulate a paper: you live with the uncertainty. Mixing the two in one sitting is not offered, because the sitting would then be neither.

Navigation: free, or forward-only. Free lets you skip around, flag, return. Forward-only is closer to a paper that will not let you flip back. If you are drilling, free is the right default. If you are pressure-testing, forward-only plus exam-mode timer plus review-at-end is the closest Practice gets to an exam sitting without pretending to be one.

Skip is labelled “I don’t know.” Use it. A skip is not a wrong in disguise on the review screen — you get correct / wrong / skipped as three counts. Guessing to avoid a skip pollutes the retry-wrong list.

Flag is for items you want to see again without deciding yet. Retry flagged is its own button after the sitting. Flag is not a bookmark that lives forever on the hub; it is for this sitting.

Progress saves. If the tab dies, you are not starting from question 1 with a blank score. The sitting is a session, not a quiz pop-up. Leave, come back, finish. Auto-submit exists for when exam-mode time actually runs out — that is the clock doing its job, not a punishment for using skip.

Maths renders as maths (KaTeX). Pictures matter: some Kangaroo items cannot be classified without the diagram. If you are on a phone with the image off-screen, scroll. The item is the picture plus the stem, not the stem alone. A sitting that you flew through on the text and ignored the figure is a sitting you did not take. Retry wrong will faithfully queue the same figure again, which is correct.

Hints exist in the session UI. Use them when you are learning a cell with immediate feedback. Do not use them as a substitute for skip: if you do not know, skip, then retry later. A hinted guess that lucks into correct will not teach the cell and will not land in retry-wrong.

What happens when you finish

The review screen is the point of a sitting, not a receipt.

You see a score, then correct, wrong, skipped. From there:

• Retry wrong — the misses, as a new short sitting. This is the fastest way to move a mastery bar.
• Retry flagged — the ones you marked, including ones you got right but did not trust.
• Full retake — same configuration, new draw (the bank is large enough that a 20-question English sitting is not the same 20 every time).
• AI gap analysis — a report on this sitting. It spends tokens. It requires the Education entitlement. It is not a tutor and not a prediction of a real exam result.

Mastery on the hub updates from sittings you complete. Per-topic bar, complexity 1–5, streak if you came back. How to aim those bars is how to build an exam study plan.

Kangaroo scoring is its own ruleset and worth not guessing. A real Kangaroo paper pays 3 points for the first third of tasks, 4 for the middle, 5 for the last. The candidate starts on the number of tasks (nobody scores zero): a 30-task paper runs 30…150, a 24-task paper 24…120. Level 3–4 is 24 tasks; 5–6 is 30 tasks in 2020–2021 and 24 in 2022–2025; 7–8 through 11–12 are 30. My Path weights the session by metadata.points. There is no wrong-answer penalty — editions disagree by country and year, so we do not guess. A practice sitting of 10 or 20 is a drill weighted that way, not a full contest paper unless you configured a full-size pull from that band.

Topic and complexity are real filters

Topic is not a cosmetic tag. The vocabulary is closed: the same labels the topic cards use. Unclassified Kangaroo puzzles display as Mixed Problems, not “Unclassified.” If you filter to Geometry, you get Geometry. If you leave topics at “all,” Mixed Problems can appear, and they should — they are items, not errors.

Complexity on the card is the easy / medium / hard row you tick. It is not the same thing as Kangaroo’s 3/4/5 point thirds, and it is not the same thing as mastery’s complexity-reached 1–5. Three scales, three jobs. The card’s complexity narrows the draw. Mastery’s 1–5 is how far you have got on that topic. Kangaroo points are how the contest weights the task number.

A sitting that filters to easy at grade 3–4 is a different sitting from easy at 11–12. That is the grade-band rule again. Do not hunt for a global “easy maths” pool. It does not exist, on purpose.

What a sitting costs

Education sittings themselves are the Student or Monthly entitlement. You do not buy General English per attempt. For Me (€4.99, IQ and personality) and Around Me (€9.99, people you track) include zero Education. Student is €9.99/month with no trial — Get Student — €9.99/month. Monthly is €19.99 with a 7-day trial at €1.99. GBP mirrors EUR (£4.99 / £9.99 / £19.99). PLN has its own ladder: zł24.99 / 49.99 / 99.99.

Tokens meter AI, including the gap report, not the sitting. Signup grace does not open Education.

Plans: /premium. The Student shape: Student plan.

Start a sitting, not a paper that is not there

If you needed a named qualification mock, it is not live. If you needed a configurable drill at one band, that is the Practice shelf, and it is live.

Open /education, pick a Practice card, pick one Level or Grade, pick 10 / 20 / 60, start. Configure the timer and feedback for the job — learn, or pressure-test — and read the review screen before you sit again.

That is how Education sittings work. Practice is the catalogue. Exams is the empty shelf we are not going to pretend is full.