About
Den Frie Prøvebank, or “The Free Test Bank,” is an archive of free, AI-generated practice exams for those learning Danish as a second language.
These exams aim to model the content and structure of the key Danish language proficiency exams undertaken by foreigners aiming for residence, citizenship and the right to higher learning in the language.
Why create a test bank?
Den Frie Prøvebank is an alternative to the official Prøvebanken (“The Test Bank”) run by Denmark's Ministry of Education, which restricts access to old exam papers, denying independent students a valuable resource:
The materials in Prøvebanken are protected by copyright. Access to the tests and exam sets is secured with a personal UNI-login and restricted to institutions administering exams under the Ministry of Education. For example, teachers and instructors with a UNI-login may download and use the materials for teaching ... The test sets may not be used for text and data mining, including the training or development of AI models.- Translated copyright notice from Prøvebanken
This came as a rude shock to someone who'd just signed up to take Studieprøven as an independent student. It also struck me as totally bizarre: Why restrict public access to publicly-funded exam papers? What's the angle? Might foreigners learn Danish, or something?
In Australia, where I grew up, old exams like those confined to Prøvebanken are publicly available. Want to take the high school linguistics exam from 2017? Print it out. Want to grade your paper? Here's a detailed rundown of every question, including sample answers and a statistical breakdown of cohort performance.
Such resources were invaluable to my studies, back then: Why can't independent, foreign students of Danish be afforded the same?
How are the tests created?
The tests are created using a general purpose AI agent, which is provided:
- The Danish government's official outline of the test concerned (e.g. Studieprøven)
- A prompt asking it to generate a test based on this outline.
The generated test is then validated by an AI agent and, when time allows, a human. (At the time of writing, humans are still validating our exams.) If there are errors, these are corrected. After this, an answer key for the less open-ended portions of the test is generated.
Do your tests match the structure and content of the official tests?
This is a goal, but not something we can actually ascertain.
The official exams are locked to all but employees of teaching institutions, so we can't really test how well we mimic the official papers — and, as a user, you should understand this limitation.
The exams Den Frie Prøvebank provide are best considered an AI agent's interpretation of the structure and content of the official exams, as outlined on various Danish government websites. Whether it's a good or bad interpretation is not something we can determine.
That being said, as somebody who's taken a number of the exams we plan to feature (e.g. PD2 and PD3), I would say that the material we provide aligns, more or less, with my recollection of the exams I sat. My personal assessment is that our papers provide, at minimum, some useful exercises of Danish ability that imperfectly resemble the official exams.
Who created all this?
This site and these practice exams are a hobby project of Søren Frederiksen, a software engineer at home in Copenhagen but born in Melbourne, Australia.
Just him and some friendly AI agents. (And you, maybe - see how you can help!)
