Where can I find public repositories of past math exams?

Question

I'm looking for public repositories/banks of past undergraduate math exams. No solutions necessary. I just want inspiration for writing my own exams and practice exams. It'd be nice to collect links to these repositories in one place.

Side-quest: I'm also interested in old exams just to compare their questions/styles with modern exams. It'd be cool to know the class scores on old exams too, but that's a separate query :)

Mike Pierce · Answer 1 · 2022-08-05T16:52:41.327

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Quite a few universities publicly post the math exams their faculty write:

UC Berkeley hosts an archive of their past exams, sorted by course.
University of Michigan hosts past exams for some classes. There's not a consolidated repository though: past exams are hosted under individual course webpages. For example here are the past exams for Math215 Mutlivariable Calculus.
Similarly the University of Washington hosts past exams under the webpage for each course. For example here is the exam archive for their Math120 Precalulus class.
UAB hosts their past calculus exams.
University of Colorado Boulder hosts some of their past undergraduate and graduate exams.

edited Aug 05 '22 at 16:52

answered Oct 15 '21 at 15:06

Mike Pierce

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Thanks for sharing. Since I'm not from USA, I was wondering how much time do students have to answer these kind of midterm/final exams. – FormerMath Oct 15 '21 at 16:57
@FormerMath Oh that depends on the scheduling of each individual college. As a guideline, midterms are usually held during a typical class period, so 1–1½ hours, and final exams usually either 2 or 3 hours. – Mike Pierce Oct 15 '21 at 17:37

guest troll · Answer 2 · 2021-10-17T01:09:56.613

USNA has a good site with old math exams and some other course materials (but mostly old tests, solutions). Well organized by course, and even listed by common course name versus cryptic course numbers.

https://www.usna.edu/MathDept/resources/index.php

If you want pre-Internet materials, my advice is to search ad hoc by course name, including reaching out to old professors directly (but also Internet and Google Scholar).

Although really my advice is to give questions similar to the drill homework, especially at schools that are not MITish in difficulty. If the kids master that, then they've mastered what needs to be tested. You should be able to write these easily from looking at the drill book or competing texts (not saying to plagiarize, can modify details).

I believe that copying math exercises is not considered plagiarism. (Story problems probably would be...) — Sue VanHattum, Oct 15 '21 at 19:25

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 16 '21 at 19:55

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The University of Cambridge makes past undergraduate exams available here.

In addition, old example sheets for some undergraduate courses can be found here.

answered Oct 16 '21 at 19:55

A. Goodier

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score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 23 '21 at 06:16

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Indian stastical instituite also has a archive of past exams and notes here for mathematics and some basic courses in statistics and computer science

answered Oct 23 '21 at 06:16

YOu will not know

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score 0 · Answer 5 · edited Oct 17 '21 at 13:40

Quite a few websites host PDFs of academic materials for the sake of student ~~cheating~~ studying. They can be tough to navigate and find specific things, but they do host tons of content.

Chegg comes to mind, although it's easier to search their site for particular questions rather than find exams. Through their Chegg Uversity push for academic materials though, I expect they'll have an large bank of materials available (for an access fee?) soon.

Where can I find public repositories of past math exams?

5 Answers5