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VCE · VCE Units 3 & 4 · official past papers

Physics — past papers by topic

Every official VCAA exam and examiner report we index, organised by topic and subtopic and labelled with the study design it was written under. Open the official paper, work the question in your own workspace, or bring a tutor into it live.

Papers and examiner reports open on the official VCAA website — they stay official and up to date. Question descriptions below are our own; we never republish exam content. Prefer to be walked through it? Book a tutor →

SD 2003–2016 (archive, two exams per year) · 2003–2016SD 2017–2023 · 2017–2023SD 2024–2027 (current) · 2024–2027

Official papers & examiner reports, year by year

YearStudy designOfficial paper(s)Examiner report
2025SD 2024–2027 (current)Exam ↗Report ↗
2024SD 2024–2027 (current)Exam ↗Report ↗
2023SD 2017–2023Exam ↗Report ↗
2022SD 2017–2023Exam ↗Report ↗
2021SD 2017–2023Exam ↗Report ↗
2020SD 2017–2023Exam ↗Report ↗
2019SD 2017–2023Exam ↗Report ↗
2018SD 2017–2023Exam ↗Report ↗
2017SD 2017–2023Exam ↗Report ↗

SOURCES: All data pulled directly from vcaa.vic.edu.au on 2026-07-08. Main index: https://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/assessment/vce/examination-specifications-past-examinations-and-examination-reports/physics — fetched raw HTML and parsed every <a> href/link-text pair (not just an AI summary) to get exact URLs. Study design content (topics[]) was extracted from the actual accredited VCE Physics Study Design document at https://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/sites/default/files/2025-10/2023PhysicsSD.docx (downloaded, converted to text, read Units 3 & 4 Areas of Study verbatim — accreditation: Units 1&2 from 2023, Units 3&4 from 2024). Exam format confirmed via the official Examination Specifications doc (https://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/sites/default/files/2025-04/physics-specs-w.docx): From 2024, single end-of-year exam, 15 min reading + 2h30 writing, Section A = 20 MCQ (20 marks), Section B = short/extended answer (100 marks), total 120 marks, contributes 50% of study score. STUDY DESIGN ERAS: (1) "SD 2024–2027" (current) — single exam, 120 marks total (20 MCQ + 100 SB), covers 2024–2025 papers. (2) "SD 2017–2023" — single exam but 130 marks total (20 MCQ + 110 SB); confirmed directly by reading the 2017 exam's own "Structure of book" table (Section A 20 marks, Section B 110 marks, Total 130) at https://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/sites/default/files/Documents/exams/physics/2017/2017physics-w.pdf. (3) "SD 2003–2016" — two separate exams per year (Exam 1 in June, Exam 2 in November); NOT included in years[] because it falls outside the "most recent ~10 years" window (2016 and earlier), but the VCAA archive page still lists these back to 2002 if ever needed. No cancelled-exam years found for Physics — the written exam ran in every listed year including 2020 (VCE end-of-year exams were NOT cancelled in Victoria for COVID; only some school-based/SAC arrangements were adjusted, which is out of scope for this past-papers index). QUESTIONS[] COVERAGE — IMPORTANT LIMITATION: I could only build a verified, first-hand-read question index for the 2025 exam. I downloaded and text-extracted the 2025 PDF (https://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/sites/default/files/2025-12/2025-Physics.pdf) via pypdf and it extracted cleanly across all 52 pages (all 20 Section A + 19 Section B questions read in full). I also attempted the 2024 exam (https://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/sites/default/files/2025-03/2024physics-w.pdf) but its Question-and-Answer-Book pages are rendered in a way that yields zero extractable text with the tools available to me (no fonts/ToUnicode map, no embedded raster images pypdf can enumerate either) — only one incidental page (p.39, a muon/special-relativity sub-question) extracted text, which I deliberately excluded from questions[] rather than build a whole-paper index off one page. I did not have poppler/pdftoppm or a working image-render pipeline available in this environment to work around that, so per the task instructions I did NOT guess at 2024 content. All 2025 descriptions below are my own one-line paraphrases of what the question asks — no VCAA question text, diagram labels, or answer content was copied. Section A of 2025 has some MCQ items I did not individually list in questions[] (kept the list to a representative, topic-spanning sample rather than mechanically listing all 39); every year/paper/report URL in years[] is still fully populated and verified regardless. TOPICS[]: taken verbatim (subtopic names paraphrased from the study design's Area-of-Study driving questions/key-knowledge headings, not copied question text) from the current (2024–2027) Units 3&4 study design — the two units actually examined in the end-of-year exam. Unit 1&2 content (Units 1: "How is energy from the Sun converted to electricity?" / "How do heavy things fly?"; Unit 2 options) is NOT included because those units are internally/school-assessed only and not exam content — matches the task's framing that topics[] is "the grouping students will browse" for exam questions. COVERAGE GAPS: (1) 2024 exam not machine-readable by me — flagged above, not fabricated. (2) years[] goes back to 2017 (start of the 130-mark single-exam era) rather than a full 10 calendar years of *distinct* papers beyond that, because 2016 and earlier used a materially different two-exam-per-year format under an older study design outside the "most recent ~10 years" scope as I've interpreted it; I included 2017–2025 (9 years) to stay within the recent, single-exam-comparable era while still reaching back roughly a decade. (3) sample examination, formula sheet and multiple-choice-answer-sheet links are supplementary VCAA materials, included in notes rather than as a "paper" since they aren't a past exam. Confidence is "medium" rather than "high" solely because of the 2024 question-level gap; every URL, year, and study-design fact was independently verified against the live official site during this session (all fetched pages returned HTTP 200 from vcaa.vic.edu.au).

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How do physicists explain motion in two dimensions? · 9 mapped questions

Newton's laws applied to linear/accelerated motion

Uniform circular motion (horizontal and vertical planes)

Question-level mapping for this subtopic is being verified — use the year table above; every official paper is one click away.

Projectile motion near Earth's surface

Momentum and energy conservation in collisions

Impulse and momentum in collisions

Energy transformations (kinetic, elastic, gravitational potential)

Uniform circular motion

Forces on an inclined plane

Circular motion on banked and flat tracks

How do things move without contact? · 9 mapped questions

Field models: gravitational, electric, magnetic

Electric fields about point charges (inverse square law)

Superposition of electric fields from point charges

Charged particles accelerated in uniform electric fields

Charged particles in magnetic fields

Force on current-carrying conductors in magnetic fields

Satellites and orbital motion in a gravitational field

Operation of DC motors and particle accelerators

Question-level mapping for this subtopic is being verified — use the year table above; every official paper is one click away.

How are fields used in electricity generation? · 7 mapped questions

Electromagnetic induction (Faraday's/Lenz's law)

AC generator operation and EMF induction

AC vs DC voltage and RMS quantities

Transformers and power transmission

Operation of DC motors

How has understanding about the physical world changed? · 10 mapped questions

Light as a wave (interference and diffraction)

Quantisation of light (photoelectric effect, spectra)

Wave-particle duality of matter (de Broglie)

Special relativity postulates and inertial frames

Length contraction and time dilation

Mass-energy equivalence

Question-level mapping for this subtopic is being verified — use the year table above; every official paper is one click away.

How is scientific inquiry used to investigate fields, motion or light? · 4 mapped questions

Designing and analysing a practical investigation

  • 2025SD 2024–2027 (current)Exam Section B Q1920 marksExtended practical-investigation question on force versus current for a current-carrying loop in a magnetic field: classifying variables, justifying experimental design choices, plotting data with uncertainty bars, finding a gradient, and estimating magnetic field strength from it.Official paper ↗Examiner report ↗Work through it with a tutor →

Systematic vs random measurement error

Interpreting experimental data and graphs

Linearising data for graphical analysis

Scientific poster communication conventions

Question-level mapping for this subtopic is being verified — use the year table above; every official paper is one click away.

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