Learning with help, practising without itLearning with help, practising without it

In January 2026 I was preparing for the Nepal Engineering Council licence exam, the multiple-choice paper an engineering graduate in Nepal has to pass to register and practise. My friends were preparing for it too. We had question sets from many places, mostly documents and PDFs with the answers printed beside the questions.

Reading a set like that does two jobs badly.

• Learning. You see the answer before you commit. If you guess right, you never read why it was right, so a lucky guess teaches nothing.
• Rehearsal. Nothing tests recall under a clock. The exam is two hours long, and speed of recall matters as much as recognition.

Get the balance wrong and you pay for it either way. Help that is always on gives false confidence. No help at all means a first pass through a half-forgotten chapter produces no learning.

I built Kati Sajilo ("how easy", in Nepali) over four days, 6 to 9 January 2026, to speed up our preparation. It is a small React web app with one question bank, and it lets you choose how much help you get with it.

I was the user. There were no interviews or usability tests. The research was my own preparation and a group of friends preparing alongside me. Many of them used it, but I have no usage numbers, and I won't guess at them.

Three things about the exam shaped the design:

• Several sittings a year. A friend group rarely sits on the same date, so a friend who has just sat the exam is a useful source for the friends sitting next.
• Preparation lasts weeks. Progress has to be there when you come back tomorrow, on the same phone or laptop.
• Nobody signs up for a friend's side project. There is no login. History is kept in the browser's local storage.

The questions come from many sources, which I combined into one bank: chapter-wise sets, official model questions, past questions, and 55 questions I recalled myself. I memorised what I could during my own sitting and wrote the questions down afterwards. Those went to the top of the home page, marked highest priority, for friends sitting later.

The obvious design is a quiz with a hint button. I started there, and it became the middle mode. What I ended up with is three modes over the same questions, each a different contract about what you are allowed to know and when:

Read left to right, help goes down and commitment goes up. Every timed test ends in a review, where the help returns for each question. Retaking a test gives you the same paper again, so two attempts can be compared.

The rule I care most about is in Learn: the explanation opens even when you are right. That is the case the answer key never covers, a correct guess you don't understand.

The first version, on 6 January, already kept attempt history in local storage. On the second evening I added a hosted database, so that history would live on a server as well.

I had no experience with backend databases. Most of that evening went into getting the database to set itself up on the host, not into anything a friend preparing for the exam would see. So I removed it the same evening and went back to local storage.

What that choice gives and costs:

The practical lesson was simple. A piece of infrastructure has to earn its place in the product. Two hours of setup work had produced no feature. Removing it made the app simpler, and the decision became visible in the product as "No login required".

A timed test is only a rehearsal if it can't be paused for free. On a phone, though, a notification, a call or a quick app switch is normal. So the question is: what should happen when the test tab is hidden?

When I read the code again in 2026, I found that it answers that question twice, in two different ways:

• The timer is built to survive. When you come back, it recalculates the time left from the real clock, so time spent away still counts.
• The test page is built to end. When the tab is hidden it asks for confirmation, and if the window has no focus it ends the test straight away and goes to the review.

One part prepares to resume and the other ends the attempt. In practice the page usually wins. This comes from reading the code, not from a reproduced bug, and it still needs a test on real phones. But it is an unresolved policy, and I'd rather decide it than leave two answers in place.

Option (d) turns leaving into information rather than punishment. A real exam doesn't stop its clock, and a rehearsal shouldn't either. But an interrupted phone session shouldn't throw away an hour of answers.

Status: a personal tool. I used it for my own preparation, and many friends used it for theirs. It is live at necmcq.vercel.app.

Measured outcome: none. I have no counts of users, sessions or scores. I don't know whether it changed anyone's result, and I don't claim it did.

What the four days did show is how priorities moved as the exam came closer. Chapter practice came first, then timed tests and review, then Learn mode, then the official and past sets. My recalled questions were added last, after my own sitting. The home page was reordered to match: recalled questions first, official and past questions second, chapter study after that.

Three lessons I took from it:

1. Decide what the learner may know, and when, before styling a screen. The three-mode contract is the product. The screens follow from it.
2. Infrastructure has to earn its place. The database added setup work and no feature. Local storage was simpler, and simple enough to ship before the exam.
3. Every exit is a design decision. Finish, time running out and leaving the tab should produce the same kind of record. Writing the rule down once would have made the conflict obvious.