Paper 1A is the multiple choice section of the IB Physics exam. It sits alongside Paper 1B in the same session, and together they make up 36% of your final grade.
That is a significant chunk. And yet most students treat Paper 1A as an afterthought, assuming that multiple choice is somehow easier, or that it will just come good with general revision. It won’t. Paper 1A rewards specific preparation, and if you don’t prepare for it specifically, you will lose marks you didn’t need to lose.
Here’s what you need to know.
What Paper 1A actually looks like
At SL, you answer 25 multiple choice questions. At HL, you answer 40. There is no negative marking, which means a wrong answer scores zero, the same as a blank. You should never leave a question empty.
Paper 1A and Paper 1B are sat in the same session without interruption. At SL the combined time is 1 hour and 30 minutes. At HL it’s 2 hours. You should aim to complete Paper 1A in roughly 30 minutes at SL and 40 minutes at HL, which works out to just over a minute per question. That is not a lot of time when the questions are hard.
If you want a full breakdown of how Paper 1A fits into the overall exam structure, what each paper is worth, and where the biggest mark gains are, read the IB Physics exam breakdown guide first.
Paper 1A is not a gentle warm-up. It is a test of physics knowledge and problem-solving under time pressure.
The thing most students don’t realise
Around 50% of the questions in Paper 1A require multiple steps to reach the correct answer. They are not straightforward recall. You have to break the problem down, work through it systematically, and select the right answer from four options that have been carefully designed to catch common mistakes.
The good news is that the difficulty is spread evenly throughout the paper. The questions are not arranged from easiest to hardest. This matters for how you approach the paper on the day.
Strategy: how to work through the paper
The single most effective approach is to go through the paper twice.
On your first pass, answer every question you can do quickly and confidently. These are marks in the bank. Skip anything that’s going to take you more than a minute or so to work out.
Then go back to the ones you skipped. Now you can give them proper time, knowing you haven’t left any easy marks on the table at the end of the paper.
If you get stuck on something early on, don’t panic. It doesn’t mean the rest of the paper is going to be hard. Some of the easiest questions may be near the end.
Graph questions
Graphs appear regularly in Paper 1A. When you see a graph question, the first thing to ask is: does the answer come from the gradient, the area under the line, or the intercept?
Very often the answer to a graph question is hiding in one of those three places. Check what the axes represent, get the units right, and think about what physical quantity that gradient or area corresponds to.
Units are worth paying close attention to in any calculation question, not just graphs. If the question gives you a rate in minutes and the answer needs to be in seconds, that is where students drop marks. The wording in Paper 1A is kept deliberately concise, which means every word is there for a reason. Read carefully.
Smart elimination
If you genuinely don’t know the answer, use your physics knowledge to rule out options that are clearly wrong.
Could momentum be conserved if two objects collide and then speed up? No. Cross that option out. Does the speed of sound in air come anywhere near 3,000 metres per second? No. Cross it out.
Often you can eliminate one or two options straight away, which turns a 25% chance into 50% or better. Make your best guess from what’s left, and move on. Never leave a blank.
How to practise
There is no shortcut here: you need to do a lot of multiple choice questions. The skill improves with practice, and it improves quickly if you practise the right way.
Work through questions topic by topic rather than jumping straight into full past papers. Do all the questions you can find for one topic, check your answers, and when you get something wrong, figure out which misconception led you there. That is the insight that stops you making the same error again.
Once you’ve worked through the topics, move to timed full practice papers. Track where you’re losing marks. The patterns will become clear quickly.
Time yourself while you practise. Aim for roughly a minute per question. It will feel brutal at first, especially on the multi-step questions. But you will get faster, and having practised under time pressure makes the real exam feel more manageable.
What the examiner knows that you might not
The wrong answer options in Paper 1A are not random. They correspond to specific, predictable mistakes. The examiner knows exactly what errors students commonly make on each type of question, and the distractors are built around those errors.
This is actually useful information. When you get a question wrong, you’re not just learning the right answer. You’re learning what trap was set for you, and how to avoid it next time.
Want to go deeper on exam technique?
The advice above covers the essential strategy for Paper 1A. But if you want to go further, I cover Paper 1A exam technique in detail in the Exam Miracle, including how to approach specific question types, how to read the wording of a question to avoid common traps, and the mindset shift that makes the biggest difference under exam pressure. It’s about three hours of video content and you can start watching today.
The Exam Pack includes past paper questions sorted by topic across all 24 topics in the current IB Physics syllabus, which is the most efficient way to build the topic-by-topic practice habit.
Get the GradePod Exam Pack for £39 →
Sally Weatherly is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, author of 4 IB Physics books (two hit #1 on Amazon), and has been teaching IB Physics since 2004. GradePod has helped 30,000+ students since 2020.