New round of content development by working with mentors will be entailed with a new budget.
We have the following resources
1. Subject specific mentors
2. Actual past paper interview questions (but not solutions), essay competition titles, admissions test questions and solutions)
3. AI content generation agents (not only notes and questions but also lectures, e.g. )
4. AI friendly project manager (Melissa)
What we don’t have is questions for extended readings, notes for most subjects and lectures for all subjects.
How each subject needs to be developed:
1.
Extended Readings
a.
Student discuss key areas addressed in each chapter. The prompting questions stimulate students to think on their feet. An example would be 'Why the law would not hold in reality' from Hal Varian's Intermediate Microeconomics that address transaction costs, non-durable goods, barriers to trade.
b.
Yes, usually students just end up reading on their own without any practice of discussing. This is why we have extended reading class with mentors.
c.
Following the Oxbridge tutorial system, the student reads the book chapter/journal article set for the week and writes an essay on a title/topic set by the mentor. Given the difficulty level of the readings, it takes time to read a page in comparison to prior readings and to look up any unfamiliar concepts. As a result, degree subject readings is a class with a low number of hours but a broad and vast amount of readings.
d.
Now, ibGuru is replacing mentors.
e.
Students should be challenged to express their take aways in the form of writing short essays on the key concept from the reading. They should be able to discuss on the chapter in Oxbridge tutorial style that challenges the student to explain and back up his/her opinions and with reference to the essay write up.
f.
The table of contents for the ‘extended reading’ will be books, e.g.
a.
What we need is notes like ‘sparknotes’ that explains what each book is about.
b.
Students ideally read the book and then our notes to fully understand what the book is about.
c.
Questions should be questions that mentors would ask in an actual class that challenge student’s understanding of key concept from the reading.
d.
I’m thinking we could generate summary notes using AI as well as questions. But it would be more accurate to use questions mentors used.
e.
Using extended reading class recordings to organize questions and answers discussed in the book and chapter specific manner.
f.
But if recordings don’t exist, asking mentors to resummarise…)
2.
Personal Statement
a.
The 3 UCAS questions will be provided as 3 essay questions. Students can have their answers AI graded.
b.
Contents is what matters not the writing style or language.
c.
There is the ‘formula’ to successful personal statement.
d.
This formula is pretty much the same for all subjects but vary slightly for certain subject groups. Therefore, table of contents will be
i.
Medicine / Biomedical Sciences/ Chemistry
ii.
Engineering / Computer Sciences
iii.
Social Sciences
Eco
iv.
Humanities
History
Philo
e.
We need to help students ‘adhere’ to the formula by
i.
Running through why a sample personal statement is excellent in both a note and lecture form
ii.
AI grading student’s work (but then the questions will be identical for all subtopics…?)
3.
Interview
a.
We will upload all past interview question database we have to our app so that students can practice for interviews using our app.
b.
Question format will be a group of short answer questions where the downstreams are follow up of initial.
c.
Tags can be used to organise questions by concepts, e.g. Membrane Transport
d.
Sources are used to label questions college-specifically, e.g. Oxford-Oriel-2015
e.
We have sufficient number of questions for some subjects, e.g. biochemistry but not for all.
f.
For all questions, we are missing solutions which can be initially AI generated and proofread by mentors.
g.
We don’t need question workthrough videos for all questions but ideally with increasing usage by students, we will be able to gain more participation from mentors for run through videos acting like the 'video solution', e.g. https://youtu.be/BFYJ-L7PGjA?si=ZMKsX8v_S4GlQobx
h.
Notes will be step-by-step guide on the subject specific interview. This should not be experience sharing blogs but like a lesson for shortlisted students. Also, this should be subject-specific with some degree of overlap across subjects.
i.
Lecture could be an interview with a subject specific mentor on the notes content or subject specific mentor running through certain questions.
j.
CSV is an easy all in one upload method.
k.
Need to organise questions and answers to this particular manner.
l.
Leverage program to automatically converts our g doc material to csv form
4.
Essay Competitions
a.
Students can access every essay competition questions/prompts per year in the last 10 years.
b.
But no guidelines or mark schemes are provided. These will be the biggest values to provide and can be AI generated and proofread by mentors.
c.
Students need help with organising research directions (what articles to read up on) and feedback on their written work before submission.
d.
Competition specific grading guidelines need to be provided that applies to all essay titles as well as the title specific mark schemes.
e.
We will offer model answers and AI grading service for each title.
f.
Notes could potentially be extended reading guidelines that will apply to any essay title for each subject? I am thinking of the table of contents to be competition specific. But then what will the note be for John Locke > Economics subtopic?
5.
Admissions Test/Olympiads
a.
Each test represents a subject and, therefore, pretty much identical to IB subject, e.g. BBO = biology, BPhO = physics
b.
Each test will therefore have a syllabus that students can study with lecture, notes and questions
c.
Curriculum needs to be designed according to the syllabus but may not be so easy because topic + subtopic hierarchy needs to be strictly followed.
d.
We will leverage past 10 years worth of test papers which are freely available online (Except for if the test format has changed and only the last few years can be used).
e.
We already have class PPTs with topic organised questions.
f.
Just like the UCAT test site, medify, students will be able to take practice tests and timed tests and track performance evaluation.
g.
Notes need to be not blogs but lesson contents, e.g. what we tried with Junhyeong 
and https://youtu.be/HkVekSwJ2FY
and https://youtu.be/HkVekSwJ2FY i.
We can copy already existing well-written notes for admissions like UCAT from https://app.medify.co/ucat/study-notes/folder/1-verbal-reasoning
h.
Questions are organised into the form of https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mMyVacc8A67TxvUAuz7bKOaX-snm65J5X9xYNo15N0o/edit?usp=sharing and uploaded to the system as an excel file (automatically converted from a google document like https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZGOQ1XEUfX7dt1jg19cx85J1MC-DokQ0Ngf45MnOE3k/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.ty8mkvt58es1 using a program)
i.
Alternatively, past papers can be uploaded as the original PDFs after being processed into the excel form using the script.
So in essence, we are allowing students to be able to practice and prepare for which ever step of the admissions process they are going through. For each subject, we will have lectures, notes and questions.
I need to assign and distribute works to complete the ibGuru UK university admissions curriculum. I don’t have concrete plans but I was thinking of
1.
Using extended reading class recordings to organize questions and answers discussed in the book and chapter specific manner (but if recordings don’t exist, asking mentors to resummarise…)
My concern is getting started. We don’t have any single example. If we do, it will be easier for mentors to know the direction we are taking. So, getting started will be difficult but once started should be easily propagatable.