Creating and Managing a Repository of Past Exam Papers

Abstract

Exam period can be a stressful time for students, and having examples of past papers to help prepare for the tests can be extremely helpful. It is possible that past exams are already shared on your campus—by professors in their specific courses, via student unions or groups, or between individual students. In this article, we will go over the workflows and infrastructure to support systematically collecting, providing access to, and managing a repository of past exam papers. We will discuss platform-agnostic considerations of opt-in vs opt-out submission, access restriction, discovery, retention schedules, and more. Finally, we will share the University of Toronto set up, including a dedicated instance of DSpace, batch metadata creation and ingest scripts, and our submission and retention workflows that take into account the varying needs of stakeholders across our three campuses.