PAL 9000 — Practice And Learn

Practice-quiz site for CIS 9000: IT Strategy (Baruch College). Weekly scenario-question sets that mirror the exam's case-based reasoning, plus a spaced review queue for missed questions. A HAL 9000 backronym — but PAL is on your side.

Built on Groundwork: a grounded generate → curate → measure pipeline for LLM-authored practice questions.

How it works

• Students open a link — no account needed. Weekly sets of ~10 questions with immediate per-distractor feedback and self-explanation prompts. Missed questions come due again after 1, 3, then 7 days (SM-2-lite; ts-fsrs is the upgrade path). Progress lives in localStorage only, with self-serve backup/restore and a screenshot-friendly completion log on the /systems/ page. The site is an installable PWA built for subway commutes: the full app shell precaches on first visit, sets keep working offline, and an interrupted quiz resumes where it left off.
• The instructor drops each week's materials into content/sources/week-NN/ (gitignored — course/publisher content never enters git), runs npm run generate <week>, and curates the over-generated candidates into content/questions/week-NN.yaml. Accept/reject stats per prompt version are logged in docs/EVAL-LOG.md — the eval loop is the point.

Commands

npm run dev            # local dev server
npm run build          # build to _site/
npm test               # vitest (schema lint + scheduler + built-site checks)
npm run generate 5     # generate week-05 candidates from content/sources/week-05/

Generation runs locally only (Claude API; needs ANTHROPIC_API_KEY or an ant auth login profile). Sources: .md/.txt read as text, .pdf sent natively — export PPTX decks to PDF first.

Question lifecycle

candidate → curated to accepted / edited / rejected: <reason> (hallucination | leakage | trivia | ambiguous | duplicate). Only accepted/edited questions build into the site; the schema lint in tests/unit/bank.test.js enforces citations, per-distractor feedback, and self-explanation prompts.

Deploying

Netlify, gated: production builds run only when the commit subject contains [deploy] (see netlify.toml).

Status

Live at pal9000.netlify.app (August 2026): app, scheduler, pipeline, offline/PWA support, storage management, and tests are built and deployed. Question content is still hand-authored sample material (promptVersion: sample-v0) pending the first real generation run against fall course materials.

Testing tip: to exercise the review queue without waiting a day, temporarily shrink INTERVALS_DAYS in src/assets/js/scheduler.js.

License

Code is MIT. The question content under content/ is not MIT — see content/LICENSE (all rights reserved; instructors interested in reuse, get in touch).

Full spec: docs/SPEC.md.