Only One Question in Seven Is Hard
Across the 36,465 questions published here, 14% are graded hard. A paper that feels mostly difficult is usually a paper you are sitting wrong.
A mock that felt easy makes people suspicious, as though a good practice paper ought to hurt. Count what is actually in one and the shape is different. Of the 36,465 questions published on this site, 5,133 are graded hard. That is 14%, roughly one in seven. The bulk is the middle, and the middle is where the marks are.
- Fourteen per cent of the 36,465 questions here are hard, 62% medium and 24% easy.
- A paper is won on the easy and medium bulk, not on the hard tail.
- At the pace most papers set, the hard questions are where a section goes wrong rather than where it is won.
- A mock that feels comfortable is not necessarily too easy. Check your accuracy on the middle band instead.
How 36,465 questions grade out
| Difficulty | Questions | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Easy | 8,740 | 24% |
| Medium | 22,592 | 62% |
| Hard | 5,133 | 14% |
Where the marks actually are
Put the split next to the clock. Most papers here give you around a minute a question and the fastest give 36 seconds, which how much time per question works through. At that pace the 86% of questions that are easy or medium are the entire paper as far as your score is concerned. The hard 14% is not where a good candidate pulls ahead. It is where an average one loses the four minutes that cost them six easier questions later.
The hard questions are not where a good candidate pulls ahead. They are where an average one loses the four minutes that cost them six easier questions later.
So stop judging a mock by how it felt
"Too easy" is the most common complaint about a practice paper and it is almost never the useful reading. A paper weighted the way real papers are weighted will feel manageable in stretches, because most of it is meant to be. The question worth asking after a mock is not whether it was hard but what your accuracy was on the middle band, because that band is 62% of everything and it is where a score moves. How to analyze your mock test performance sets out how to pull that out of a result.
What the hard band is for
It is not padding. A paper with no hard questions gives you nothing to practise triage on, and triage is the skill a timed exam actually tests. The point of the hard band is to give you something you should decide to leave, under a clock, often enough that leaving it stops feeling like failure. If you never meet a question you cannot do in practice, the first one you meet will be in the exam hall.
What these labels are and are not
Worth being plain about this. The grades are this site's own, applied to original questions written against each exam's published syllabus, not to past papers and not by the exam bodies. They say how hard we judged a question to be, which is a useful relative signal across 36,465 of them and not a claim about any real paper's composition. No exam body publishes a difficulty split, so nobody, including us, can tell you what fraction of your actual paper will be hard.
Every test on the site reports its own split when you finish it, so you can see which band your accuracy actually sits in rather than guessing. Start from your exam's page in the exam directory.
Put the strategy into practice
Choose a checked mock test and apply what you learned while the idea is fresh.
Frequently asked questions
How difficult are competitive exam questions?
Most are not hard. Across the 36,465 questions published on this site, 24% are graded easy, 62% medium and 14% hard. A paper is decided on the easy and medium bulk; the hard band is mostly where time gets lost.
My mock test felt too easy. Is that a bad sign?
Not by itself. A paper weighted the way real papers are weighted feels manageable in stretches, because most questions are meant to be answerable. The useful check is your accuracy on the medium band rather than how the paper felt, since that band is the majority of any paper and the place a score actually moves.
Should I practise only hard questions?
No. Drilling only the hard band trains you for about one question in seven and leaves the part that decides your score unpractised. Hard questions are worth meeting under a clock so that deciding to leave one becomes routine, which is a different purpose from getting better at them.
Are these difficulty labels from the exam bodies?
No. They are this site's own grades on original questions written against each exam's published syllabus. No exam body publishes a difficulty split for its papers, so the labels are a relative signal across this corpus rather than a prediction of what your real paper will contain.
