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Written, not scraped.

Nine steps sit between a course and the page you read the night before the exam. Here they are, with a straight answer on which are done by people and which by software.

It starts with the right inputs

Named and ranked before a word is written. Fewer than these, and we promise less.

1Two or three past exams
2The syllabus
3The learning objectives
4The lecture slides
5The prescribed text
6What the lecturer said would be examined

The nine steps

Nothing is published before step seven. Nothing stays published without step nine.

Take it apart

Before a word is written.

01Gather the inputsAn author from the program collects them. They know where a university keeps them.
People
02Take the exam apartEvery past question mapped to the objective it tests. What is asked yearly, once, never.
People
03Draw the mapThe course reordered by what the exam asks, not by chapter.
People

Write it

Along the map, in the author's own words.

04Write the summaryIn the author's own words, along the map, with software drafting beside them. Nothing copied.
Peoplewith software
05Build the practiceSoftware generates questions at volume. The author keeps the ones that ask what the exam asks.
Peoplewith software
06Build the mockA full exam at real level and real timing, written against the autopsy.
People

Check it, keep it

The two steps that never end.

07Check it line by lineA second reader who passed the course, past papers open. Nothing reaches a student before this.
People
08Publish into passOSSummary, practice and mock go live together in the engine that tracks readiness per topic.
Software
09Keep it currentA swapped lecture updates the summary the same week. A reported mistake is fixed, and the change shown.
Peoplewith software

Written by students who passed it.

Recently, and still remembering what made it hard. There are 15+ authors and coaches on the team today, every one of them taught this process first.

  • Passed a course we cover? Write it. Authors are paid per course and credited in the summary.
  • Sat the exam and scored it? Coach it. The method comes alive with a person in the room.

What we never do

  • Copy a slide, a page or a paragraph.
  • Publish a page nobody re-read with the past papers open.
  • Fix a mistake quietly. The correction is shown to everyone.
  • Sell material for a course we have not written.
  • Pretend a course without past papers can be reverse-engineered.

See one, running

The summary, the practice and the mock for one lecture, exactly as a member sees them.

The summary page

Sampling and estimation3 / 9
The sampling distribution and the standard error

The sampling distribution describes what happens when you take many samples from the same population and compute the mean of each one. Its spread is the standard error: the standard deviation divided by the square root of the sample size.

ON THE EXAMTwo of the last three papers asked for the standard error with a given n.

The practice

The Central Limit Theorem says the sampling distribution of the mean is approximately normal…
AFor any population, once the sample is large enough
BOnly if the population itself is normal
COnly if sampling is done without replacement
Not quiteThe theorem is about the sample size, not the population's shape. FROM LECTURE 3

The mock

Under exam time56:16
Question 2 of 40

Same length, same clock, graded on the faculty's cesuur.