Customized GPT for IB Past Papers

Today, after completing my 11th-grade finals, I realized how students at ISB use IB past papers to prepare for exams. While these past papers are invaluable for revision, one major drawback I noticed is that many websites providing past papers don’t categorize the questions by sub-topic for certain subjects. As a result, students are left to manually organize and classify each question into topics, which can be time-consuming and inefficient.

Hence, I decided to develop a solution: a GPT-powered bot that would assist students in preparing for exams more effectively. Currently, I've uploaded one Physics past paper, and my vision is to gradually expand this database to include questions from all past papers as I continue uploading them.

However, the development process hasn’t been without its challenges. One of the main hurdles I faced was that GPT is not yet advanced enough to interpret diagrams from the PDFs I uploaded. This is a critical limitation since many IB questions, especially in subjects like Physics, rely heavily on visual data. To work around this, I instructed GPT to provide direct links to the original questions with diagrams. Unfortunately, GPT often returned incorrect or broken links, leading to 404 errors or no results at all.

After researching the issue, I decided to manually edit the instructions and type out the correct links myself. Though this was more labor-intensive, it allowed me to ensure that students could access the necessary questions without frustration.

Looking ahead, my plan is to continue uploading all past papers, so that GPT can provide a comprehensive set of questions—not just the 2023 Physics HL TZ1 questions. My ultimate goal is for the school to recognize the value of this tool and potentially integrate it into our official school website, allowing students to access the resource directly, rather than having to search for it through external GPT platforms.