Catalonia PAU Physics / Física 2º Bachillerato (CIC Generalitat)

It is the physics paper within the university entrance assessment for Catalonia. Your mark contributes to the weighted admission score for degrees that take physics as a modality or weighting subject, typically engineering, physics, chemistry, mathematics, and some health-science programmes. It is not a professional certification; it is an academic admission score.

Expect a written exam with several problems or structured questions, each split into parts, mixing calculation with justification and graphical or vector analysis. Some parts ask you to explain a principle or interpret a graph rather than compute. The official body publishes the current structure, number of questions, and choice rules each year, so check its site before your sitting.

Those figures are fixed by the official university access body and can change between sittings, so they are not stated here. Consult the official body's website for the current duration, scoring scheme, and the minimum mark needed for the grade to count. Do not rely on numbers remembered from previous years or from other regions.

Yes, in general the PAU can be taken again in later sittings to improve a subject mark, and the better result is normally the one considered. The exact rules on number of attempts, validity of marks, and how improvements combine with your admission score are set officially, so verify them with the access body or your school's academic office.

Difficulty comes from breadth and from precision, not from trick questions. Most items test standard syllabus situations, but they demand correct setup, units, signs, and a justified conclusion. Candidates who lose marks usually do so through algebra slips, missing units, or answering only the numerical part when an explanation was requested. Steady topic-by-topic practice with past model papers closes most of that gap.

Start with mechanics-adjacent blocks: gravitation, harmonic motion, and waves, because they share energy and oscillation language. Then electrostatics and magnetism, which build on field and potential ideas. Optics follows naturally from wave reasoning. Leave relativity and modern physics for a focused block, and integrate uncertainty and graph work into every topic rather than treating it as a separate chapter.

Working in the wrong units or dropping them entirely, giving a magnitude without direction for vectors, skipping the justification when the question says 'explain' or 'justify', misreading a graph axis, and failing to state the physical principle used. Also common: not answering every part of a multi-part question, and running out of time because too long was spent on one problem.

Do them closed-book and timed, then mark strictly against the published solutions, scoring method and justification separately from the final number. Keep an error log tagging each mistake as concept, algebra, units, or misreading. Revisit the tagged concepts a week later with fresh problems. Two or three well-analysed papers beat ten papers skimmed for the answer.

You should know the core relations fluently enough to select them quickly, but memorisation alone will not carry you. Examiners reward recognising which principle applies and combining relations correctly. Practise deriving simple results, such as orbital speed or lens position, so that a forgotten formula can be reconstructed from definitions rather than guessed.

The Generalitat's university access body publishes the syllabus, model exams, and administrative rules, and your school's academic coordination office can confirm deadlines and procedures. Always treat that official material as authoritative over summaries, forums, or this page, which is independent study guidance and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the examining body.