Welcome to Stooey's New and Improved Page of Utter Crap

The ROEY paper, and other A-Level Capers

Anyone who's ever done A-Level maths should have at least realised one thing. It's not that exciting. Maybe computation or engineering isn't exciting to some, but hell, at least we get cool toys to play with. The most exciting thing I ever played with in A-Level maths was a setsquare. But that's a different story... (see "May!")

When faced with almost certain extinction from deprivation of all forms of stimulation (and indeed, a degree of mental "numbness") it's natural to look for something to occupy time, other than what we should be doing. A friend of mine, Jim, used to sit next to me in maths. He, like I, was a master of the tangent (not the mathematical form). A student of the sidetrack. Between us, we could have had a degree in digression. See? I've digressed for the last two sentences already. One day, between us we turned to the best cure of mathematical, or any other type of boredom we could find: parody.

I think the idea was spawned from us picking apart a question worded "hence or otherwise". It does make sense, and it's grammatically correct. The subtle point we realised though, is that there exists a language outside English, and a format seen nowhere else, that applies purely to exam papers. From the list of rules and regulations printed on the front, in bold letters, like the ten commandments, to the stupidly obvious statements about blank pages.

We sat down with a pen and paper each and began to construct our own pages. Some were funnier than others, some we discarded, some we kept. We had a lot of time on our hands - it's not like we worked in maths, which was scheduled for an hour a day. We spent A-Level Computing lessons typing our questions, even adding random pictures and spurious notes where we felt appropriate. And thus ROEY was born. A few other people gave us ideas for questions. Some we liked, some we ignored. The damn thing just wouldn't stop growing!

So, here it is, for your viewing pleasure and downloading leisure... It is the product of two whole years of A-Level Maths, incorporating the best efforts of two rather deranged and slightly adled minds. Some of the jokes are slightly obscure (they relate to our A-Level groups) but people who did A-Level maths should appreciate most of them. If you need any explanations, e-mail me here. Many of the spelling mistakes are deliberate too (look at the context ;). I hope you enjoy it.

The ROEY paper