Jay Myers, SR Software Engineer
August 15, 2024

Amidst a sea of turbulent AI ventures and attempts to leverage LLMs as a tool for organizations and the industry, it is worthwhile to investigate alternative focus areas. Test preparation is one such area that provides several benefits compared to more traditional areas of attention. Enabling students and candidates to understand, retain, digest, and apply information more effectively is a benefit not only to those individuals but to anyone who depends on their expertise in the future – be they a doctor, engineer, gardener, or hobbit pilot our society at large is helped when mastery is widespread.

Study Buddy is a tool intended for candidate preparation and general education or study. It can ingest authoritative literature or sources (e.g., textbooks) and use that information to help guide someone’s study. It does so with a set of functionalities (outlined below) intended to improve information retention, practice application, validate understanding, and recall.

On a practical level, there are several benefits to focusing on candidate preparation over content creation. The first of which, and the primary reason for our initial venture outside of The Shire the norm, was copyright and ownership. If no claim to the generated content is made and intended to be transient, then questions about sufficient levels of human involvement are sidestepped. By connecting candidates to the tool directly, we empower them to learn and review at their own pace, limited only by themselves as opposed to an external organization.

Another benefit of focusing on a more candidate-directed preparatory experience is the room for experimentation and trial. The stakes regarding any individual item or interaction are lower than in an actual examination, which means we are free to try less conventional approaches to preparing our candidates. The injection of playfulness and interactivity, for instance, may serve to cement information in the minds of our participants better than a static list of questions could. It’s also just a little more fun.

Lastly, on a personal level, it feels good to help people achieve their goals in a way that could be enjoyable. Examinations are already such high-stakes and high-stress activities, potentially governing candidates’ future or livelihood, that it is beneficial to allow candidates a more self-directed preparatory experience. And if we can inject a little fun into the experience, all the better.

Let’s make things a little more concrete with a walkthrough of what something like this could look like for a student who is studying biology and medicine.

To begin with, we can set up a course to cover a specific textbook or source material; in this case, we will be using a freely available PDF textbook titled “Current Essentials of Medicine.” All we need to do is create a “course” to hold this information and upload the text. This will provide all required support for this course and allow us to begin interacting with it.

First, we get started

Then, we create a course

Then we upload our material

Once we have this setup, we can begin our journey—and we have a few places to start. We may want to generate a course outline to review the information uploaded and scaffold a basic outline of the content. We do this by simply clicking “Generate Outline.”

A generated outline

Once we have our outline, we can use it to generate questions to target what we want to focus on. Let’s pick a couple of topics and develop some questions. You may notice the controls on the right side of the table—these can be used to generate a number of questions, a common passage or setup with a number of sub-questions, and a target difficulty.

Let’s focus on cardiovascular diseases for now, and we’ll generate a few questions. The questions we create are stored and available for us to look at directly or to take as part of a practice exam at any time. Each question is evaluated for a few metrics, including notes about the item, a Bloom’s taxonomy level evaluation, and a relative difficulty evaluation.

Three example questions

Launching a practice exam will deliver all the questions and allow us to answer them in a simulated examination environment.

A passage on the left-hand side and one of the three sub-questions on the right

A platform like this allows us to be a little more creative than just creating content and delivering practice exams, though. For a couple of examples, I’d like to highlight Flashcards and an Adventure Game.

Flashcards are a straightforward, rapid method of determining understanding. When we practice with a flashcard, we’re first given the card and the option to give a hint or reveal the answer. A hint might give us a nudge in the right direction.

A flashcard with a revealed hint

For those of you who prefer a bit of a story, there’s also an adventure game that attempts to blend education and entertainment, allowing you to determine whether it should be grounded in reality or fantasy.

The beginning of a text-based adventure game

We’ve done more experiments within this platform, and there’s plenty more to add and discover, but for now, this brief walkthrough will come to a close as we look forward to the future and what it might hold for students and candidates alike.

About the Author

Jay Myers is a Senior Software Developer who has spent more than a decade developing and refining testing and testing-related products here at Strasz. From authoring to delivery, standard setting, item analysis, and test prep, he’s been involved in a wide variety of areas supporting test providers and certification bodies. Prior to working at Strasz, he was involved in the Electronic Medical Record space on a product which, statistically speaking, if you’ve been to a hospital in the US has probably been used to treat you. Graduating from Penn State with a degree in Computer Science, he has been interested in solving problems from a young age and his work at Strasz enables him to do that every day. When he’s not working, he spends his time enjoying nature, baking, reading, creative writing, and consuming long form critical analysis of his favorite video games and media.