RoMathExam: A Longitudinal Dataset of Romanian Math Exams (1895-2025) with a Seven-Decade Core (1957-2025)

TL;DR

RoMathExam is a comprehensive, longitudinal dataset of Romanian math exams from 1895 to 2025, enabling research in difficulty modeling, curriculum analysis, and language-specific AI evaluation.

Contribution

It introduces a large, structured Romanian math exam dataset with curriculum tags, embeddings, and a novel complexity metric validated across multiple AI models.

Findings

High correlation of the complexity metric across models (r > 0.72).

Identified a shift from diverse historical formats to a standardized modern curriculum.

Demonstrated the dataset's utility in longitudinal curriculum and difficulty analysis.

Abstract

AI in Education research increasingly relies on authentic, curriculum-grounded assessment data, yet large, well-structured exam corpora remain scarce for many languages and educational systems. We introduce RoMathExam, a longitudinal dataset of Romanian high-school mathematics exams spanning 1895-2025, with a robust standardized core for 1957-2025. The dataset contains 10,592 mathematics problems organized into 600+ complete exam sets across multiple tracks (M1-M4), covering both official national examination sessions and ministry-published training variants. Beyond high-fidelity digitization and a unified JSON schema with traceable provenance, RoMathExam is enriched with curriculum-aligned topic tags and dense text embeddings, enabling variant detection, deduplication, and similarity-based retrieval. To overcome the lack of historical psychometric data, we propose and validate a solution complexity metric as a scalable intrinsic proxy for difficulty. Our evaluation across three frontier reasoning models (GPT-5-mini, DeepSeek-R1, and Qwen3-235B-Thinking) reveals high cross-model synchronization (r > 0.72), confirming the metric's ability to isolate intrinsic mathematical depth from stochastic generation noise. We demonstrate the dataset's utility through a longitudinal analysis that quantifies a "regime shift" from volatile historical formats to a standardized, algebra-dominant modern curriculum. RoMathExam provides a foundation for reproducible research in difficulty modeling, curriculum analytics, and LLM evaluation in low-resource linguistic contexts.