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With a few exceptions, 1905 was an unremarkable year in British history. At home, the women’s suffrage movement had begun. In Europe, Bloody Sunday had heralded the start of the Russian Revolution and Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity. For chemistry, the major milestone was the development of the Haber process. This transformed agriculture, but as the basis for many exam questions it has caused headaches for school students to the present day. And yet in 1905, before the discovery of the proton, 18-year-olds were taking chemistry exams that are in many aspects both familiar and alien to modern students.

An unremarkable office block on the edge of the University of Manchester campus is home to a fascinating archive of more than 100 years of exam materials, set by what is now the AQA exam board. Although it has been through many incarnations in its time, AQA can trace its history back to an alliance of the universities of Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds. The wealth of information provided by the archive generates a number of research questions, the most pressing and challenging of which is: have chemistry exams become easier?