All questions written by Newcastle University School of Mathematics and Statistics now freely available to re-use
Here at the School of Mathematics and Statistics at Newcastle University, we provide computer-based assessment through Numbas to all of our first- and second-year undergraduate maths modules, as well as many other courses at later stages or for other schools. We write these questions on a private Numbas editor, so that we don’t accidentally reveal content to students, and so we can control editing access through our centralised IT system.
However, it’s always been our policy that everything we create will end up on the public editor at numbas.mathcentre.ac.uk, shared under a CC-BY licence. It’s been quite a while since we last copied anything over, so I’ve spent this morning copying over just about everything we’ve got. It’s all organised under a new account, Newcastle University Mathematics and Statistics. At the moment, we’ve got 101 exams and 497 questions – that’s a lot of maths!
This academic year we’ve reinvented our first-year syllabus, so at the moment only content for our semester 1 modules is on the public database. All of our second year modules are there, however, as well as third-year courses on group theory, coding theory, and number theory and cryptography. I’ve also transferred each of the exams we’d made available on mathcentre.ac.uk to the school account.
I’ve written a few extensions to add data types and functions necessary for a few of our more advanced courses, which are also available on the editor and on GitHub. They are:
- A data type to manipulate polynomials
- A data type and functions to work with permutation groups
- Functions to solve and demonstrate various algorithms in optimisation theory
- Data types and functions to work with linear codes
While you can pick and choose from our questions, a good way in is to look at our exams, which collect together questions on similar topics. Our first-year modules have been split up into chapters corresponding to more detailed topics, but the other courses were only collected into weekly assignments, so I’ve just made a single exam for each of those modules, containing all the relevant questions.