Prelim Solutions

This page contains user-submitted solution files to previous years' preliminary exams. To access a year's solutions, either click the link to that year in the table of contents below or go directly to the Drive folder with all the solutions.

Uploading solutions

Users are encouraged to upload their solutions in whatever form they have them, whether they be detailed solutions formatted in LaTeX or scanned back of the envelope calculations. Don't let fear of errors in your solutions prevent you from uploading, or else only the easiest problems will be posted. The slight downside of this philosophy is that the viewer of the solution is responsible for ensuring its accuracy, but this is something you should get used to in your pursuit of becoming a good scientist.

Whatever you post, please be sure that it is in a generally convenient form (e.g. pdf, jpg).

Solution Manifest (2020-present)

Contains a list of all problems since the 2020 prelim revision with problem topics, available solutions, and the source of said solutions. (n.b. there was another spreadsheet documenting solutions to earlier prelims, but it seems to have been deleted.)

Comments and errata

Solutions are provided as-is and may contain errors. If you have comments on solutions, please leave them in the comments and errata document under the appropriate year heading.