This post is only about our archived courses — if you are learning with us at learn.saylor.org, the courses, exams, and certificates work the way they did yesterday, the way they do today, and the way they will tomorrow!

One of the major requests we have had since we closed the old testing center last month if to make final exams available for our archived “legacy” courses. While not hugely difficult, the task of downloading, editing, and re-uploading these exams, gamely undertaken by Tanner in his spare moments, was nevertheless a bit tedious and lengthy.

But now it is done! We kept it clean and simple: there is one webpage that shows all the questions in the final exam (usually about one hundred) and a second webpage that shows all the questions with answers highlighted. Keep in mind that actual final exams typically would pull just 50 of these questions. These pages are not interactive nor automatically graded, but we’re willing to bet a sufficient bribe to a friend or family member (ten year-olds especially) will get the job done for you. To be clear, these exams do not lead to certificates of completion and your grades are not recorded; these exams are purely for self-assessment (or for reuse and remixing, of course).

Links to the final exam and the answers can be found on the first page of any legacy course (with the exception of a few courses for which a final exam was never produced). Those links look like this:

Legacy final exam and answer key links

If you want to cut right to the chase, just head to this beautiful all-in-one page (with links to download the whole shebang): http://saylordotorg.github.io/LegacyExams/

The core GitHub repository for all the exams and answers is here: https://github.com/saylordotorg/LegacyExams — which naturally leads to a question…

What else can you do with these exams besides just taking them? Here are some ideas:

  • Report errors as issues in GitHub or fork the repo, make changes, and send us a pull request
  • Reuse these questions in your classroom
  • Use these questions as a foundation to write new test items with just a simple attribution under our Creative Commons license
  • Change the presentation to be more interactive and post your versions on the Web — share back to the Commons and we may choose to go with your version instead of ours
  • Digital art project…it is called Creative Commons, after all

Our work noodling on these is largely done, but we’re very pleased to be able to share these once again and we look forward to seeing how people use these exams and the courses they belong to!