Last month, we launched PaGaLGuY Prep in a rather basic sort of fashion to get a sense of how you all felt about our take on CAT prep online. Based on your feedback and suggestions, we took Prep back to the factory to add the next set of features and refinements are ready with PaGaLGuY Prep 2.0. With an adaptive learning mode, bookmarks and ranks, it’s just what you might need in the last few days to CAT.
(Read a recap of Prep until now).
Let me run you through some of the major features and refinements of Prep.
1. Everybody learns at their own pace – which is why, the Learn Mode throws questions at you depending on your current level in any subject and then smartly adjusts the difficultylevel based on your strike rate. So let’s say, you start solving questions in the Algebra section in the Learn Mode. Prep will first throw some questions of varying difficulty at you to figure out what level you can currently handle. When it finds the highest difficulty level that you can handle, it will stabilize at that level. Depending on how you fare from there on, Prep’s smart adaptive engines will gradually increase or decrease the toughness of questions. Each question that you solve will unlock new concepts and tricks of solving, that you will learn from the solutions posted by others using Prep. The increase in difficulty will be gradual and before you know it,you would have begun to reach a level of mastery in that section.
Questions that you like or want to save for reference later can now be bookmarked using the Favorites feature. Just click on the ‘Star’ symbol above a question to add it to your Favorites list.
2. A better interface for Solutions – You can now express your opinions about solutions with Thanks and Groans, the popular feature from the PaGaLGuY Forums you are already used to. Be careful with this feature though, particularly the Groans. It takes initiative for someone to post a solution and if you are groaning at them, it better be with good reason. At the end of the day, you come to PaGaLGuY for getting access to a great network of people!
You can also bookmark really good solutions with the ‘Star’ symbol for reference later.
3. Favorites – All the favorite questions and solutions that you bookmarked can be accessed at once inside the Favorites section. We got a lot of requests for such a feature after the previous version of Prep, so here it is.
4. It’s all about glory – If you are good in a particular section of CAT, people ought to know so that they can look up to you for help. So your profiles on Prep now feature ranks. There are two types of ranks: the first, for your ability in a section, that is, how good you are in a section compared to others using Prep. Yes, the Abilities ranks are percentile-based. Which means that you might be a Demi God today, but you will have to keep up your performance in Prep in order to maintain that rank. The second type of rank tells people how helpful you are in terms of posting solutions to questions, or how people are rating your solutions with Thanks and Groans. Unlike the Abilities ranks, you do not have to keep your contribution consistent in order to maintain your Helpfulness ranks.
5. See what others are upto – you can view the Live Activity feeds to know in real-time what others are upto. This is a great way to access new questions and keep a tab on active discussions in the moment.
There are several more refinements in Prep, which you will discover as you use it. As always, Prep is in beta, which means that it will continuously evolve based on your feedback on the discussion thread for Prep 2.0 (link) feedback and suggestions. So keep using Prep and telling us about how we can make it better. Until the next version, then!