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 question browser and select a subject and 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.
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 adds 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 — 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. 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 to read any question. 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 Mathematics is the first subject beyond Physical Sciences. 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.