croqaz/vintage-exam-qa
Vintage exams Q&A This is a fine-tuning dataset, extracted from vintage books using code (not with AI). These 6 books from Archive.org are included: Advanced question book 1883 Common school examiner and review 1890 New common school question book 1888 New common school question book 1900 Recreations in the common school studies 1885 School Room Search Light 1895 Four books have separate sections for the questions and answers, so they had to be matched (you don't need to do… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/croqaz/vintage-exam-qa.
Vintage exams Q&A
This is a fine-tuning dataset, extracted from vintage books using code (not with AI).
These 6 books from Archive.org are included:
- Advanced question book 1883
- Common school examiner and review 1890
- New common school question book 1888
- New common school question book 1900
- Recreations in the common school studies 1885
- School Room Search Light 1895
Four books have separate sections for the questions and answers, so they had to be matched (you don't need to do this). Only two books have the questions and answers in the same place.
There are 11,218 Q&A pairs in total.
Challenges
The OCR scanning quality of these books is bad, and it required significant effort to get to perfection.
Example of text from "The advanced question book":
20. What are Chaucer's works ?
Ans. — The principal one is the Canterbury Tales. It la
Literature. 15
a collection of admirable daguerreotypes of the various
classes of English society, and consists of twenty-four
stories supposed to have been told by a company of pil-
grims on their way to Canterbury. The others are the
Bomaunt of the Base, Court of Love, Chaucer's Dream, Bok&
of the Duehesse, Legend of Good Women, etc.
Extract: —
" And the rivere that I sat upon,
It made such a noise as it ron,
Accordaunt with the birdes armony,
Methought it was the beste melody
That mighte ben y heard of any man."
Cuckow and the Nightingale.This was the original text, but after the first step of processing, I got it to this:
20. What are Chaucer's works?
Ans.—The principal one is the Canterbury Tales. It is a collection of admirable daguerreotypes of the various classes of English society, and consists of twenty-four stories supposed to have been told by a company of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury. The others are the Romaunt of the Rose, Court of Love, Chaucer's Dream, Boke of the Duchesse, Legend of Good Women, etc.
Extract:—
" And the rivere that I sat upon,
It made such a noise as it ron,
Accordaunt with the birdes armony,
Methought it was the beste melody
That mighte ben yheard of any man."
Cuckow and the Nightingale.And the last step, structured JSON:
{
"type": "qa",
"number": 20,
"question": "What are Chaucer's works?",
"answer": "The principal one is the Canterbury Tales. It is a collection of admirable daguerreotypes of the various classes of English society, and consists of twenty-four stories supposed to have been told by a company of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury. The others are the Romaunt of the Rose, Court of Love, Chaucer's Dream, Boke of the Duchesse, Legend of Good Women, etc. Extract:— \" And the rivere that I sat upon, It made such a noise as it ron, Accordaunt with the birdes armony, Methought it was the beste melody That mighte ben yheard of any man.\" Cuckow and the Nightingale.",
"section": "GENERAL LITERATURE"
},I consider this dataset gold level, not platinum. I would have to spend way more time to get the plain-text books to absolute perfection, but the structured JSON is very clean.
Disclaimer
This dataset contains historically accurate information that was considered perfectly normal at the time, but by today's standards can be considered: toxic, offensive and unsafe.
Citation
If you find this dataset valuable, please consider citing:
@misc{vintage-exam-qa,
title = {Vintage exams Q&A},
author = {Cristi Constantin},
month = {June},
year = {2026},
url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/croqaz/vintage-exam-qa}
}