The guexam class

Format exam papers

• You may want to look at a sample exam. See the sample/ directory in the distribution for the source of this. That demonstrates the final version of the paper, as opposed to the ‘draft’ and ‘compose’ versions; there’s also a version with this layout but showing the solutions.
• If you're a question author, you probably don't want to read the full documentation. Stick to the shorter notes for authors.
• See the documentation for fuller discussion.

To install

Unpack the distribution tarball or zip file, and move the directory move-to-texmf/ (or its contents) to some location on the LaTeX search path. You're probably looking for a directory called texmf-local, or something like that.

In practice (and probably preferrably, if you are managing exam source files in a git or other repository), you may prefer to put these in the same directory as the exam source files.

The distribution includes a file gulogo-snapshot.zip, which contains the files required to supply the GU logo. The guexam class will work without error in the absence of these files, but won't, obviously, produce the logo on the exam papers. To install, unpack the zip file, and move the files in move-to-texmf/ to a suitable place. Typically, only the exams convener will need to care about this, since question authors use only the [compose] mode, which does not attempt to use the logo.

‘Move…to a suitable place’ is admittedly very vague. Here are some pointers, however:

• This can be the same location as your exam source files. This will work, but you'll have to do this for each directory, so this is just about acceptable for question authors, but inconvenient for the exams convener.
• See the good generic advice in the TeX FAQ.
• Your LaTeX environment might have some hints on ‘installing new style files’, or you can search online with some search string like that.
• If you're on a unix-like OS, then the command kpsewhich guexam.cls will show you which class file LaTeX will use (so if it produces no result, that's telling you that LaTeX won't find the files); also kpsepath tex will display, in an admittedly very oblique form, the list of places where TeX will search.
• If you're using MikTeX, then the documentation on the ‘MikTeX console’ includes a section on ‘Registering a user-managed TEXMF root directory’. This rather obliquely says that you can ‘register a user-managed TEXMF root directory’. What that means is that (i) you should go to a folder such as ...\Users\yourname\AppData\MikTeX, (ii) create a sequence of folders so that you end up with ...\MikTeX\texmf\tex\latex\guexam, and (iii) put the distributed .sty and .clo files in the latter folder. The directory ...\MikTex\texmf is your ‘user-managed TEXMF root directory’, and you should add it to MikTeX's search path using the instructions above.

Various people within the School use various LaTeX implementations. Amongst these are:

• TeXLive for unixes,
• MacTeX for macOS,
• MikTeX for Windows.

For exams, we don't recommend you use Overleaf, though Overleaf is otherwise a good idea. This is for the fairly obvious reason that it's off-campus. Don't store exams in a cloud service!

Releases

With the version 1.1 release, the interface should now be regarded as rather stable. However version 1.1 was the first to be released outside Glasgow University, so there may be some changes to the interface which will emerge with broader use, as well as some bug fixes. The interface may, therefore, yet change. If you use this class to produce exams, you should therefore include a copy of the class file locally, rather than relying on a central version. If you need an earlier version of the class, let me know.

Earlier release notes are available