Spot the mistake!

There is an updated page here.

A great way to get students thinking about mistakes and misconceptions and hence deepen their understanding of topics is to have them mark the work of others. There are some great resources hosted on TES that will allow your students to do just that.


Particularly excellent resources come from Andy Lutwyche, look at his excellent Erica’s Errors seriesfor Spot the Mistake activities. See also, on TES – further Spot the Mistakes resources from Andy Lutwyche.

sim eq


Edexcel’s A Level Teaching and Learning Materials, a growing library of resources offer excellent support for teachers.Edexcel Model Answers
The exemplar answers with examiner comments provide a particularly valuable resource. These booklets look at questions from the AS and A level Sample Assessment Materials, which was used in the trial undertaken in summer 2017. Real student responses are shown together with commentary showing how the examining team apply the mark schemes. The commentary includes always useful notes on common
errors. These could be used in class and students asked to find errors.

Edexcel Model Answers example


TES resources I have come across include:

R Barnard’s Bob’s Ratio Homework 

Craig Barton’s lovely little starter on Algebraic Misconceptions (this one is truly tried and tested – I used it as a starter for a lesson observation and followed it up with a class discussion on what advice students would give to students making the kind of errors here – it went down rather well with the observers!)

Kaszal’s Fractions Mistakes

and Damian Watson’s

Transformations AfL Spot the Mistakes

Enlargement Spot the Mistake Booklet

Fractions AfL Plenary Spot the Mistake Booklet 

Thank you to all the great authors of these resources.


On the subject of mistakes, the Classic Mistakes website has a gallery of posters of classic errors made in Mathematics. These could be a prompt for a useful discussion starter activity. Note that an audio file is also available for each poster.