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Past Paper Index #82

Closed qaisjp closed 5 months ago

qaisjp commented 5 years ago

Provide an index of past papers and their (attempted) solutions for every course.

Reasons for:

Reasons against:

AlexJLP commented 5 years ago

Different people have different ways of dealing with papers & attempted solutions. For example, some people (me included) like taking partial screenshots from the original PDF and discussing the solution underneath; all in a drive document. Others may prefer commenting on the original PDF. The drive can also be nice if you want to print out all/multiple previous papers from the same course.

The question is what the point of the index is? Simply to generate a searchable question bank?

AlexJLP commented 5 years ago

IMO it's wasteful (of an infinite resource)

Yes, I agree. Is the university obliged / do they guarantee hosting in the future?

and requires maintenance (because they exist).

The proposed solution would arguably require more maintenance. Is there one person that is supposed to maintain the whole list or do you leave it up to whoever people are in a particular course? Some courses may be neglected (some already are).

qaisjp commented 5 years ago

Different people have different ways of dealing with papers & attempted solutions.

I guess eventually what would be nice would be some kind of standardisation.

For example, some people (me included) like taking partial screenshots from the original PDF and discussing the solution underneath; all in a drive document.

I like this approach! For OS, the questions were just copied out into the Doc in bold and reformatted to be a little cleaner. Some figures were screenshotted and pasted in.

Others may prefer commenting on the original PDF.

I've never seen this! Do you have an example?

Yes, I agree. Is the university obliged / do they guarantee hosting in the future?

Good question. We should find out.

Computer Security goes back to May 2002 on the Drive. On exampapers, it goes back to May 2005.

I would excuse the fact that exampapers is missing May 2002 and May 2003 (which we have on Drive), since those are actually "Computer Science Four: Computer Security", which is a complete different generation of courses.

Oddly enough, May 2004 (on Drive), titled "Computer Security" is missing on exampapers. But that paper also says its for 4th years and MSc students. So I guess that's the year between making Computer Security available to 3rd years, and the year they had Computer Science 1A/1B/2A/2B etc.

(This could all be verified by a nice visit to DRPS, but I am a little lazy right now.)

I do not want us to delete papers that are unavailable on exampapers, for sure.

IMO there's little point in studying from papers that go THAT far back -- but then again, when I was at school, I did maths past papers that released in my birth year... and it was still mostly relevant. So they should still be kept around for the students that want those papers.

The question is what the point of the index is? Simply to generate a searchable question bank?

Not a searchable question bank (although that is not a bad idea...), but just a table like this for each course:

Key:
- `gold`: complete and answers verified to be correct
- `silver`: complete but contains mistakes
- `bronze`: incomplete

Course: INFR10yada Computer Security

Exam         | Questions | Solutions | Status
-------------|-----------|----------
August 2018  | questions | solutions | gold
May 2018     | questions | solutions | bronze
August 2017  | questions | solutions | silver
May 2017     | questions | solutions | gold
August 2016  | questions | solutions | gold
May 2016     | questions | solutions | gold

- `questions` above is a link to exampapers.ed.ac.uk
- `solutions` above is a link to the Google Doc, which also contains the questions copied over

e.g. Operating Systems has some good "gold" solutions, but Software Testing has many "silver" solutions.

This would achieve a few things:

The proposed solution would arguably require more maintenance. Is there one person that is supposed to maintain the whole list or do you leave it up to whoever people are in a particular course? Some courses may be neglected (some already are).

Actually, yeah, you are right. The idea is that it is left up to whoever is on the particular course (with some initial work done by me and hopefully others to bring it up to date).

I think the biggest the barrier is getting people to edit the page. People find it easier to upload to the Drive than to edit Better Informatics.

If we enforced a directory structure, we could maybe automate the solutions list (requiring just the "Status" and "Questions" fields to be provided)?

The drive can also be nice if you want to print out all/multiple previous papers from the same course.

Because all direct links are in the same place, this actually becomes easier. Ctrl+Click on all the question papers you want, and they all open in a new background tab. You can't Ctrl+Click on Google Drive.

What we would lose out on, however, is the ability to select multiple files and have Google Drive generate a zip file with those question papers.

AlexJLP commented 5 years ago

I guess eventually what would be nice would be some kind of standardisation.

Agreed. There should be some centralised CONTRIBUTING instructions.

Some figures were screenshotted and pasted in.

This makes a lot of sense for figures, graphs, code listings, etc. as they don't always convert nicely.

Others may prefer commenting on the original PDF.

I've never seen this! Do you have an example?

The example I was thinking of was outside of BI, it was a multiple choice exam and the annotations were to signify which answer was (thought to be)

IMO there's little point in studying from papers that go THAT far back

Agreed. There may still be some value to archiving the papers.

Re Index:

both questions and solutions can be accessed from one page (instead of two folders, like many subjects currently have)

Got it and agree.

ratings on how question papers are

Might be hard to enforce specific ratings as they may be subjective (especially for courses where there usually isn't ONE correct answer, e.g. Usec). Might be possible to replace / add some sort of metric to this that signifies the maturity of the solutions. E.g. paper from 4 years ago for popular course will have more mature solutions (more peer reviews) than a paper of the same age for some obscure course not many people take.

some guidance/tips can be put on this page for how to write solutions effectively

Agreed. A searchable question bank would be cool but might be too much work for the utility it would provide.

automate the solutions list

Would be cool to pull new papers from exampapers.ed.ac.uk though this is gated behind cosign and some in-scope courses may not follow the clear INFR12345 coding.

qaisjp commented 5 years ago

The example I was thinking of was outside of BI, it was a multiple choice exam and the annotations were to signify which answer was (thought to be)

Yeah, this seems like a pretty smart solution. I suppose in this case the solutions linked would just be annotated/commented question papers.

Might be hard to enforce specific ratings as they may be subjective (especially for courses where there usually isn't ONE correct answer, e.g. Usec). Might be possible to replace / add some sort of metric to this that signifies the maturity of the solutions. E.g. paper from 4 years ago for popular course will have more mature solutions (more peer reviews) than a paper of the same age for some obscure course not many people take.

I think your suggestion is a better idea.

Although generally courses like USec could choose to deviate from these guides.

A searchable question bank would be cool but might be too much work for the utility it would provide.

This would be implementable if we replaced the entire Google Docs system of writing past paper solutions. Someone tried that before (graduated end of 2016/17) by converting their honours project, but it was written in PHP (ew) and hard to deploy (I tried with difficulty). Happy to look into this - we have a license for multi-user document editing - but not sure if it's worth it in terms of maintenance cost beyond our lives.

Would be cool to pull new papers from exampapers.ed.ac.uk though this is gated behind cosign and some in-scope courses may not follow the clear INFR12345 coding.

... I'll send a ticket to the Central IS and see if there's some sort of exampapers API... and maybe see if we can get a perpetual service account. Very much doubt we would get this though, but would be great. Should probably first speak to Informatics computing support and hear their POV before going above them.

Unfortunately URLs can't be guessed - they seem to have some random numbers in it. Or maybe I just can't reverse engineer the URLs very well.

yutotakano commented 1 year ago

I'm revisiting this issue after my exchange to ETH Zürich where I found their website for past paper community solutions extremely well designed (exams.vis.ethz.ch). It's maintained by the computing society there, although there's a tighter coupling with the uni staff there than here. They have now released their whole system as GPL and I'm very much keen on trying it out for UoE Inf.

Feature set:

This feels like a more friendlier solution than GDrive Discussion documents (suggested above). It could be at e.g. exams.betterinformatics.com.

However, its use is exclusive to past papers though, which means the other content hosted on BI Drive (tips, cheatsheets) might become less used/obvious. I stand corrected, it can be used for summaries, cheatsheets, and any filetypes. Documents other than past exams are uploaded by the community freely.

The backend is an S3-compatible storage, they use MinIO within a Docker container to keep it all internally on their systems. This isn't compatible with Google Drive so if this software is used, either everything will need to be moved, or functionalities separated (some things on gdrive, past papers on exams.bi.com).

Does anyone have thoughts?

yutotakano commented 1 year ago

Screenshots of their interface since some of it is behind a login-wall. (Speaking of which, they are able to use their uni LDAP system since it's hosted on ethz.ch -- we aren't able to do that with BetterInformatics and it doesn't look like we're going to be allowed to use EASE or DICE logins anytime soon, so we'll need another auth method if going with this)

Collapsed msedge_2023-08-20_12-31-16

Expanded msedge_2023-08-20_12-31-24

qaisjp commented 1 year ago

looks good and sounds great!

yutotakano commented 1 year ago

I've written up a proposal document for migrating BI files from Google Drive to a dedicated exam collection / past paper index. The name is yet to be decided, but the plan is to do the engineering work and migration throughout early this semester, and put it through test during the autumn exam season. Could all interested parties take a look? I've linked a demo instance too.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GNcChsJYa-jKhWEzOWU7Ebba9K15rY0kJ_yZQi6ZxR4/edit?usp=sharing

yutotakano commented 5 months ago

The proposal above has now been followed through and has now been implemented and launched at https://files.betterinformatics.com. We're seeing good use this exam season with around 500 registered users. While it's an added technology burden, I'm currently securing admins for the next few academic years so hopefully it'll keep us rolling.

The source code, CI, the hosting infrastructure (Kubernetes), and database backups are on Tardis, with a mirror here: https://github.com/compsoc-edinburgh/edinburgh-community-solutions

Screenshots ![msedge_2024-05-05_14-01-33](https://github.com/compsoc-edinburgh/betterinformatics/assets/60749079/21ce8c09-4b2c-452f-b3be-3b8eb168906e) ![msedge_2024-05-05_13-58-26](https://github.com/compsoc-edinburgh/betterinformatics/assets/60749079/81d31f1b-4156-45a6-b91b-1d22f7bb1519)