Nigerian standardized tests – UTME, NECO, WAEC. They are the sorts of things that keep students up at night. They certainly kept me up back in senior high, and preparing for them was torture.
If I were writing my standardized tests in 2015, with this app I just discovered, preparing would be less of torture, I’m sure. It would probably be more like a day in the neighbourhood game truck.
Exam Prep (something needs to be done about the name), is a free app that gamifies the preparation for NECO, UTME and WAEC – the three most popular standardized tests in Nigeria.
What the app does is simple: curate a collection of past exam questions in all subjects taken in these standardized tests and have users answer them. The differentiator is how it makes that engagement gamey and social.
At the core of the app is the social reputation which is tied to a user’s performance in tests (I’m currently a Rookie). Users can go ‘head to head’ with other users in a quiz off.
The app tracks performance and provides reports after each quiz. For instance, after trying my hands with the Economics UTME questions (which I bungled real nice), it gave me a breakdown of topics where I performed well and the one in which I didn’t. Turns out, I suck at Theory of Price Determination.
In the Hambuger menu to the right of the app, I can toggle between tests, check my lifetime performance, the leaderboard, and school news (an in-app blog).
The app is doing a lot of things right. I didn’t have to sign up to use the game app which meant I could experience it easily instead of getting pushed back by all the time it would take me to register.
There are a lot of good things to write about this app – it’s fast and for all the time I used (about 2 hours), it didn’t once crash. However, there a couple of places where it fell short.
I have no intention of sounding off fussy, but the UI could be more mature. Exam Prep (fix the name) looks like an app for pre-school kids. Also, when taking tests, it helps if users know how many questions they are answering perhaps by using the ‘1 of X’ numbering, instead of a regular nominal progression. It also helps user experience to inform users when they have finished a test. When I finished my Economics test, the page simply refused to flip instead of informing me I had finished the test.
The app was developed by Elvis Chidera and Alex Nnamdi, two developers from Port Harcourt, south of Nigeria. They could do more to improve the app, but for an app like this, I’ll pay for a premium version. However, the developers have said it’ll be “free forever”. How cool is that?
There is no iOS version of the app yet. But check out the Android version on Play Store.
Image via Angieslist
