44 GTU papers, one CSV: counting which exam questions repeat

Disclosure: I built GTU Hero, a site that shows GTU previous-year papers with repeated questions highlighted. This post is about the counting exercise behind it.

Students at Gujarat Technological University circulate "IMP question" lists before every exam, and most of them do not say where the list came from. I wanted a boring, checkable answer to one question: if you take the official papers for a subject and count, what actually repeats?

So I counted 44 official papers from GTU's own question paper repository across three first-year subjects (Mathematics-1, Mathematics-2 and Physics, Summer 2022 to Summer 2026). I extracted the text with pdftotext, tagged every sub-question by topic, and counted a topic once per paper if it showed up anywhere in it.

A few results:

• Mathematics-2 (3110015): 9 of the 22 tagged topics appeared in all 9 papers. Green's theorem sat in the compulsory Q.1(c) in 8 of them.
• Syllabus hours are not exam frequency. The Fourier integral unit gets 2 teaching hours in the official syllabus and appeared in all 9 papers.
• Exact repeats cross subject codes. One Physics numerical (ultrasonic source at 0.09 MHz, pulse back after 0.55 s) appeared in two 3110011 papers and two BE01000021 papers.

The messy parts were more interesting than the counting: a PDF where pdftotext returned only 587 characters because the questions were images, one subject name with several codes, and the rule for what counts as a "topic".

The full write-up, with the code and everything that broke, is on DEV: https://dev.to/offpage_prince/how-i-count-repeated-questions-across-44-gtu-exam-papers-and-what-broke-439o

Corrections to my tagging are welcome as issues.

If you are a GTU student, the plain-language version of the Maths 2 count is GTU Hero's Maths 2 repeated sums guide.

Past repetition is a pattern, not a promise. GTU can change a paper any time.