On 1 February 2026, Qualifications Scotland replaced SQA and became Scotland’s new national awarding body. The documents on this page remain current and you can continue to use them. We’ll update them in the style of Qualifications Scotland when they’re next due for review.

Biology and Human Biology common questions (342 KB)

We've made some changes to the Higher Human Biology course assessment, following feedback from educators and learners:

• We've replaced question paper 1 and question paper 2 with a single question paper. It has two sections:
  - Section 1 has multiple-choice questions and is worth 20 marks.
  - Section 2 has restricted response questions and extended response questions and is worth 80 marks.
• The new question paper is worth 100 marks in total and lasts 2 hours and 30 minutes.
• The assignment is still worth 20 marks and we’ll scale this to 25 marks instead of 30.
• We’ve removed ‘Appendix 2: question paper brief’ from the course specification and published this as a separate document.

We’ve amended the question paper details in the course specification. There's no change to teaching and learning. You might want to update your assessments (for example, prelims) to reflect the changes to the question paper.