Beta Update #4

Hey everyone! Justin here with a short and sweet update—hence the unshaven pre-gym look. Look, nobody watches these anyways, right? They'll be fine.

Free Quick Prep Bundles

The Quick Prep Bundles for American Government and Introductory Sociology are still available for free on the website. The free trial for American Government was supposed to end last weekend, but the feedback you guys have been giving has been great and very helpful, so I'm gonna go ahead and extend it until next weekend—about the 12th of December. I just finished Introductory Sociology last night and put it up there as well, also for free. Those are good for two months, so I'd highly suggest grabbing one just in case you want to take the exam any time soon.

I'm planning on getting at least one bundle out per week right now—that's the goal. I'm basically going by what's more popular, or at least what I think is more popular. But if we don't have one you need and you're ready to take something in the next month or so, let us know and I'll move that one up to the top of the list.

Practice Test Revamp

Related to that feedback I got, the practice test questions are getting a revamp. I've been hearing from people saying that our questions were too hard. That's partially by design—I want to overprepare you guys rather than underprepare y'all. But as I was taking the practice tests during my quality checks, I realized some of these are really academic. They're tough to read, and that's not what we're going after.

So I'm dialing down the difficulty. I'm going through them all and basically rewriting them, targeting the 12th grade reader. I've already done that with Introductory Sociology and it came out really great—much, much easier to read and understand now. Go ahead and give that a shot and see what you think. If it needs to be tweaked some more, just let me know. It just takes forever. I cannot tell you how much fun it is to go through 600 questions a day. So much fun. It's not fun at all.

Favorites System

Next up is favorites. I was getting messages saying that people were having multiple tabs open because every time they finished a chapter test or practice test, it would take them to the classroom and they'd need to go back to the study guides. You don't need to do that! The whole purpose of the favorite system is to move everything over to your classroom so it's ready every time you finish a practice test.

Unfortunately, nobody was using favorites—or at least a very small portion of you were. There's an adage in web design: if your users aren't making use of something, it's either not very useful or you've hidden it too well. I'm not a web designer, so I'm going to take the hit on this one. I probably made it too hard.

Now, whenever you take a chapter test or practice test, if you don't have it favorited already, a box will pop up and ask, "Do you want this exam to be your new favorite?" If you say yes, everything moves to the classroom, so it's all right there when you finish. No more opening multiple tabs or clicking five times. Let me know if you like it or if you don't—I'm interested in hearing your thoughts.

Email Delivery Fixed

Email delivery issues have also been fixed. We were having problems with Yahoo specifically bouncing our emails for registration and password resets. It ended up being a me issue once again—surprise! I just wasn't paying SendGrid enough money, so they weren't using dedicated IPs and Yahoo thought it was spam. I shelled out some extra cash and now deliveries are going through without a problem. Yay, my poor wallet.

Wrapping Up

That's about it for this update. There are about 20 or 30 other things we've gotten fixed behind the scenes. I don't think you guys will ever see that, but hopefully it'll make the site run a little better. I'll hit y'all up again for the next update. Talk to y'all soon. Bye!