New A-level Project Diary

Main project page

Hours

Week 1: 7 + 5 + 6 + 8 + 6 = 32 hours

Week 2: 8 + 5 + 5 + 5 + 5 = 28 hours

Week 3: 7 + 7 + 7 = 21 hours

Week 4: 7 + 7 + 7 + 4 = 25 hours

Week 5: 8 + 8 + 8 + 4 = 28 hours

Monday 9th July

We worked 10am-4pm roughly. After I got home I worked another hour 6pm-7pm.

• Photographed papers 1951-1978.
• What to do with papers marked "Ordinary Level"? We assumed that these were O-levels, i.e. outside our scope, and skipped them (except for when we forgot to). They seem to be somewhat arbitrarily scattered - I found one in 1951-1956 except 1955. They're in the Advanced book, so maybe they aren't ordinary O-levels.
  • On Wednesday, I asked about these in passing, and it turns out they are probably alternative syllabuses and so forth, but they are still O-levels, so ignorable.
• We have answers, but in the early few papers the mark schemes were hopelessly vague (roughly "some questions have different numbers of marks") so we didn't bother with them.
• I have an application that tags photos, and have started tagging things by year, tagging Answers pages, etc. I'm not yet sure how to export the tags to something usable generally, but I'll work on it.

Tuesday 10th July

David is marking STEP questions today, tomorrow, and Thursday. I worked 10:30am-3:30pm.

• Photographed papers 1978-1989.
• Today I switched to a camera I brought myself. The battery does not last all day but worked for two hours in the morning, then another two or so after an hour's charge. It produces much better images (even at the same resolution). I retook the small-font images from Monday (i.e. the 1978 questions) and then continued.
• I finished all the paperbacks on the shelf, and it was nearly the end of the day so I decided not to bother finding the newer stuff - instead I had a look at some of the examiner's reports to see if they were of any interest.
• When checking pictures for visibility, we looked at fractions and exponents, but one page from 1968 contains a fraction /in/ an exponent and it's pretty much unreadable. Some pages may have to be rephotographed with the new camera.

Wednesday 11th July

In the archive 10am-2pm, worked additionally 3pm-5pm.

• I have an internet connection from the room! This should make note-taking a little easier.
• I'm told that in syllabuses, black vertical lines next to material mean that material is new that year. Most material is not so lined, so there is a lot of redundancy.
• I'm now photographing syllabuses and reports from 1989 backwards (this way round because before 1970 or so they are not in this room and have to be fetched, so it's easier to start at the end).
• Done 1989, 1988, 1987, then decided that the amount of similarity meant I'd be best getting a few scattered than a close bunch, so did 1985, 1970, 1979, 1974.
• Reports have been described to me as a bit haphazard, and are only present some years. I've found them in 1989 and 1974 but they are quite long and run close to the margin, so a nuisance to photograph.
• The 1979 book actually contains two syllabuses. Asking about this, I'm told that it's probably one syllabus for the exam that year (and 1980), and another syllabus to start teaching new students, to be examined for the first time in 1981.
• Generally speaking, the syllabuses and reports are much less well-organised than the papers, so it's very hard to be sure whether or not I've found all of them.

Thursday 12th July

Worked about 10:30am-4:30pm in the CMS and a couple more hours at home.

• Archive not open today so mostly tagging and taking notes.
• In the afternoon, David came back from his marking work, so I changed focus to trying to find a good way of getting the photos in a state where we could both work on them, while in the meantime he investigated recent resources (like those linked at the bottom of the page), This took essentially the rest of the day.
• My work culminated in this CGI script: https://bm380.user.srcf.net/NRICH.

Friday 13th July

Worked from 10:30am-4:30pm. David had more STEP marking to do.

• Spent the morning working on the CGI script some more.
• Power cut mid-afternoon in the CMS, so I went home.
• Spent the afternoon continuing yesterday's work: tagging and writing up.

Monday 16th July

Worked 9:45am-5:45pm on tagging papers by subject, as well as by year, and continuing the below writeup.

Tuesday 17th

Worked from about 10:30am, trying to tag the syllabuses and other stuff to find out what exactly we have. Headed to the archive for 1pm, left 3:30pm.

• There's a problem with dating syllabuses inasmuch as they typically are examined for more than one year, and are published in a different year from the one in which they are examined. Some intelligence may be necessary in matching syllabuses with papers.
• At the archive, got 1975 pp24-25, and the 1958 Maths I q2(i) problem turned out to be a bad photo, so retook it.
• 1975 Stats Special paper is just not there, and apparently there's nowhere else it could be. Sad face. Possibly this is also the fate of 1977 Stats Special Answers.
• 1957 (July 1956) syllabus in force 1960 except for additional mathematics.
  • Looks like the syllabus is in the 1960 book anyway, fortunately.
• Need to read the syllabuses for 1979 to work out what's going on with those.
• Need to read the syllabuses for 1966 to see if it contains the Stats paper.
• (David) Tagged years 1978-1980 - first page of answers 1979 is perhaps missing.
  • Found and rephotographed it.

Wednesday 18th July

In the archive 10am-3pm, retaking unclear photos, doing more tagging, and looking for more reports.

• Turns out 1979 has three seemingly-identical copies of the new mathematics syllabus. If the photos for that turn out badly, there's alternatives.

Thursday 19th July

Meeting in the morning, 9am-10am. Discussed various, talked to Steve a bit until 10:30am, and then sat in the CMS doing research and tidying up this page and reading papers until 12pm. I took a long lunch break, then worked 2pm-4pm.

• As a preliminary study in these last couple of days before we disappear for a week, we're going to read over questions from years 1951-1955, maybe solve a few, and take notes on what we think the purpose of the question is, and how they fit together. We'll then compare what we came up with and see what we can make of it.

Friday 20th July

Worked 10am-12pm, lunch, then 1pm-4pm.

• As an experiment, I tried typing up a paper to see how long it would take. I wrote up 1951 Paper I in about 20 minutes, which was slower than I was hoping (but I personally could probably not do much better).

Wednesday 1st August

Worked 11am-6pm roughly.

• To answer one of Steve's questions, I think a very scalable/parallelisable job would be writing up the questions in a machine-readable form. I am currently investigating whether OCR software can do this for us but preliminary results are not promising.
• This is the best I've managed to do so far, even with image preprocessing: https://bm380.user.srcf.net/ocrexample – correct sentence fragments are found in some cases, but it's still not enough to save effort over just typing everything. Possibly I could improve on this - the software I am using is "trainable" - but it's looking less and less likely to be easier than just typing it all up. Estimating two hours per year, that would take about 70 hours of work, which isn't too bad - more if you want diagrams etc. done.
  • Oops, I estimated two hours per year on four papers per year (half an hour per paper, being generous) but four papers make a subject, not a year - a year is at least eight, so we're looking at maybe 150 hours, maybe more.
• In anticipation of the questions being textified one way or the other, I've started work on a new CGI script to do much the same as the other, but with questions.

Thursday 2nd August

Started work at 9:30am. Half an hour break around lunchtime, finishing work at 5pm.

• Continuing with script work. Question tagger more-or-less complete: https://bm380.user.srcf.net/NRICH/q.
  • Eventually all the written-up questions would go on here, where they can easily be compared and retrieved. For the moment, I am only including links to the image containing the question.
• Also added a feature to the paper tagger which will allow you to download files in a zip.
• Met David to discuss next steps. We are working on 1951-1960, he on Maths, I on Further, and trying to determine:
  • what the questions are really asking
  • how much/in what way are the questions challenging
  • how the treatment of a particular subject area changes over time
  • how the questions compare with the syllabus

Friday 3rd August

Worked 10:30am-5:30pm

• It's hard to assess a question's difficulty without in-depth knowledge of what was taught at the time - was the trick necessary to do some question standard practice? Syllabuses aren't specific enough.

Monday 6th August

Worked 10am-5pm.

• Puzzled over 1951 Further I 2 for a while. Wrote an addition to the CGI script to make it easier to edit existing content.
• Started reviewing some tags made yesterday to explain them in more detail.
• Started tagging some questions with "projective geometry", after looking up what it was. These are kind of tricky since I never did projective geometry.

Tuesday 7th August

Worked 9:30am-4:30pm.

Wednesday 8th August

Worked 10am-5pm.

• Going to see if I can get a range of years tagged, so focussing only on Further Paper I first of all. Seems like "geometry" is too vague a tag; should probably identify subcategories like with mechanics (started 2D tag, at least).
• Subsequent to the above, started using "triangle", "ellipse", "circle" tags. I try to tag only if a specific knowledge of the properties of the relevant thing would be useful, but when in doubt have been generous.

Thursday 9th August

I felt ill, so I stayed at home.

Friday 10th August

Worked 10:30am-5pm but with an extended lunch break - maybe four hours work total.

Monday 13th August

Worked 9:30am-5:30pm

• Having talked to David about his approach, I think I probably ought to adopt some components of it - in particular matching the content versus the syllabus.
• I spent some time today recovering photos I took on my phone at the archive, but ultimately decided they were not useful.
• Made a table of the tags in an attempt to make sense of them: https://bm380.user.srcf.net/NRICH/table

Tuesday 14th August

Worked 9am-5pm

• The summer school stuff was going on so I was in that in the morning, working on my tags while paying half attention to it. Getting an eduroam connection from MR4 is tricky and essential to my work, so I eventually gave up trying and went back into the core.

Wednesday 15th August

9am-5pm.

• Slightly closer to the door this time. Hopefully that will help.
• On 1955 Further II 8, taggingwise.
• Despite getting mobile tethering working, it is far too slow to salvage my work, so I'm giving up on lectures again after the first.
• I can't do 1952 Further IV 9.
• Created tag circular motion. Not sure if it's quite the right distinction.
• Come across questions referring to centre of gyration, am tagging them moment of inertia (it seems the concepts are closely related).
• I suspect trigonometry is too often useful to tag every time it's relevant to a question. I should come up with a more coherent idea of when it's necessary to tag it.
• Helped with the summer school stuff in some of the afternoon.

Thursday 16th August

9:30am-1:30pm.

• It's possible, depending on various other circumstances, that this is the last day I'll be able to work - certainly I won't be working tomorrow or next week. I'll attempt to leave the tag database I've made in some sort of usable condition.
• Made a few edits to the content creator in the question database so that it was more usable. Probably more work needed.