GCSE Physics equations: which ones to learn by heart
A student sits down in front of me with the equation sheet open, points at the line for kinetic energy, and still cannot answer the question. Nothing is missing from the sheet. What's missing is the ability to do anything with it. That gap, between having an equation and using one, is where most of the lost marks in GCSE Physics actually live.
In this guide
What's on the sheet, and what isn't
Here's the sentence that causes the trouble: "they get given the equations." Parents hear it at parents' evening, or from another parent in the car park, and quite reasonably conclude that this is one thing off the revision list.
It isn't, quite.
Students sitting AQA GCSE Physics in 2026 do receive an equation sheet, and they receive it in both Paper 1 and Paper 2. That's a genuine change from a few years ago and it's genuinely helpful. But the sheet carries a selection of equations, specifically the ones the board decided were hardest to hold in your head. The everyday ones are not on it, because the board expects those to be second nature by the time your child walks in.
So the revision list gets shorter. It doesn't disappear. And the equations that stay on it tend to be the ones that come up most often, which is an awkward trade if your child has decided the sheet covers everything.
Check which board your child sits
Before your child spends an evening making flashcards, find out whose exam they're actually sitting. AQA, Edexcel and OCR each draw the given-versus-memorised line in a slightly different place.
This matters more than it sounds. A revision list downloaded from the wrong board has your child dutifully memorising equations they'll be handed on the day, while skipping the ones they won't. It's ten minutes of checking that can save a fortnight of misdirected effort, and it's the single most useful thing you can do here without knowing any physics yourself.
The board name is on the front of every past paper, on the exercise book, and usually on the school's website under the subject. If you can't find it, the physics teacher will tell you in a one-line email.
Rearranging beats reciting
Now the part that actually decides the grade.
Almost every question worth more than two marks gives your child the wrong arrangement of the equation. They know that force equals mass times acceleration. The question gives them the force and the acceleration, and asks for the mass. Reciting the equation gets them nowhere; rearranging it gets them the mark.
Students who've only memorised the string of letters freeze at this point, because they learned a sentence rather than a relationship. Students who can rearrange don't much care which way round the question comes, and they're the ones who finish the paper with time to check. It's the same algebra fluency that pays off across GCSE Maths, which is why the two subjects prop each other up so directly. A surprising share of dropped physics marks are really dropped algebra marks, and my guide on how to revise for GCSE Maths covers how to drill exactly that.
A drill I use with my students: take one equation and write out all three arrangements of it, side by side, before doing a single question. Three lines, thirty seconds. Do that for the ten equations that come up most and the freeze stops happening, because there's nothing left to rearrange under pressure.
Units and prefixes, the quiet mark-loser
Units are where marks disappear without anyone noticing, including the student.
An answer with the right number and no unit usually drops a mark. So does the right number with the wrong unit. And because the arithmetic was correct, your child comes out of the exam certain that question went fine, which means they never go back and fix the habit.
The prefixes cause their own trouble. Kilo, mega, milli, micro, centi. A question quoting a distance in kilometres and expecting an answer in metres is not testing anything clever; it's testing whether your child noticed. Under time pressure, plenty don't.
The fix is to learn each equation as a package rather than a formula: what the symbol is, what it means, and what unit it comes in. That costs no extra revision time, because they're learning the equation anyway, and it protects the last mark of the question.
A five-minute test you can run
You don't need to understand any of this to be useful. Genuinely, none of it.
Ask your child to write out their must-memorise list on one side of paper, from memory, with the units. Then check it against the list from their board's specification, which you can read off a screen without following the physics at all. Anything missing goes on a card. That's the whole exercise.
Do it again a week later. The second attempt tells you far more than the first, because the gap between what stuck and what didn't is the actual revision problem, and it's invisible from a single go.
Two things to watch for while you're doing it. If your child writes the equation but hesitates over what a letter stands for, they've learned the shape rather than the meaning, and that falls apart the moment the question phrases things differently. If they can write every equation but can't rearrange one, the problem isn't physics revision at all.
Common questions
Are equations given in the GCSE Physics exam?
Some are. AQA students sitting in 2026 get an equation sheet in both Paper 1 and Paper 2, but it carries only a selection: the ones the board judges hardest to recall. The everyday equations, and every symbol and unit on the sheet, still have to come from memory. Handing a student the sheet doesn't remove the need to know what the letters mean.
Does the physics equation sheet change between exam boards?
Yes, and it's worth ten minutes to check which board your child sits. AQA, Edexcel and OCR each draw the line between given and memorised in a slightly different place, so a revision list downloaded from the wrong board will have your child memorising things they'll be handed, and skipping things they won't.
Do students need to memorise units as well as equations?
They do, and units are where more marks quietly go than on the equations themselves. An answer with the right number and no unit, or the wrong unit, usually drops a mark. Learning each equation as a package of symbol, meaning and unit costs no extra time and protects the last mark of the question.