About the College

AN INDEPENDENT INSTITUTION · FOUNDED MMXXVI

The College of All Minds (Collegium Omnium Mentium) is an independent academic institution, affiliated with no university, conceived as the deliberate antithesis of All Souls College, Oxford. Where that college examines a few candidates in private and elects fewer, this one publishes its examination entire and invites the world to answer. Its sole undertaking is The Truly Hardest Exam in the World: ten papers and, at present, three hundred and thirty-two questions, spanning the sciences, mathematics, philosophy, engineering, computation, sociology, design, and — since Expansion v5.0 — music and geography, each admitted through the discipline that examines it. The motto is Manent et numerantur: they remain, and they are counted.

The method

Three disciplines govern everything published here, and each is checkable. First, the record is append-only: no question is ever altered or renumbered, so a citation of the form “Paper III, question 14” holds in perpetuity, and every change is entered, dated and versioned on the Records page. Second, every question carries references of record — one thousand and one sources at present, three to a question — and every address is verified live at the moment of publication: by direct retrieval with content checks for the great majority, and, for the handful of sites that refuse automated clients, by a second client or by the search index returning the page’s current content, with the method noted in the instrument of the deployment concerned. Third, each source is described twice — once technically, once in plain terms — so that a reader outside the field can judge what a source establishes before deciding whether to open it. Sources are chosen for being freely available; nothing cited here sits behind a paywall.

The editor

The papers are set, referenced and maintained by a single hand, writing as the Clerk of the College. The Clerk’s standing duties are those of the method above: to admit questions only through the rubrics, to verify every reference at issue, and to keep the record so that nothing published is ever silently changed. Correspondence reaches the Clerk through the Responses page, and every response of merit is entered in the Register there — numbered, dated, and retained.

The site

The site is hand-built static HTML: no scripts, no tracking, no advertising, and no content behind an account. The complete examination and every paper may be downloaded in Markdown; a subject index of thirty sub-topics points into the papers at the level of the individual question; and each question links to its own sources and each source section back to its question. Everything on the site is intended to be read, quoted, cited, and answered.