Practice & mock exams

CLIP Learn gives you two ways to test yourself against real single-best-answer questions: Practice (an adaptive, self-paced drill that reveals the answer and explanation after each question and feeds your topic mastery), and Mock exams (a timed, exam-conditions paper you sit end to end, marked only when you submit). Both draw on the same underlying question bank but behave very differently. This page documents every control, field and rule you will meet in each.

Both areas are for learners (the CANDIDATE role). Staff accounts can open the same pages, but the question pool and history shown are scoped differently — see Who sees which questions.

Practice (adaptive drills)

Practice lives at /app/practice. It is a single-question-at-a-time drill: you pick an answer, CLIP immediately marks it, shows the rationale for every option, updates your mastery for that topic, and moves you on. There is no timer and no pass mark — it is for building reps, not for scoring.

How a practice session is built

When you open Practice, CLIP does not give you a random shuffle. It builds a targeted 15-question session for you:

The scoring formula weights weakness most heavily (60%), then difficulty fit (25%), then jitter (up to 15%). In practice this means your weakest topics surface first, at a difficulty pitched just above where you currently sit, not so hard you are guessing and not so easy you learn nothing. A topic you have never practised is treated as a neutral rating (1000), so brand-new topics still get sampled to establish a baseline.

The filter bar

Across the top of Practice is a filter bar. Your selection is carried in the page URL, so you can bookmark or share a filtered view.

The topic filter is a case-insensitive "contains" match, so a chip labelled "Contract" will also pull in "Contract formation" and similar. Selecting a topic clears the Course/Sample split styling (the URL now carries topic instead of bank).

Answering a question

Each question card shows a progress line ("Question 3 of 15"), the topic (and subtopic if the question has one), the question stem, and five options labelled A to E.

You cannot skip a question without answering it, and you cannot go back to a previous question — Practice is forward-only. Once you click an option there is a brief "busy" moment while CLIP records the answer; if that request fails, your selection is cleared so you can try again.

The hint ladder

If a question has hints authored for it, a Need a nudge? button appears below the options (only before you answer). Hints are graduated — up to three, revealed one at a time.

Hints are fetched from the server only when you ask for them, so they never sit in the page waiting to be peeked at.

The mastery feedback after each answer

After you answer, a short line tells you how that topic's mastery moved, for example: Contract law: +14 → Developing. The parts are:

• A verdict — "Nailed it." if correct, or "Good rep — learn it, move on." if not.
• The topic name.
• The delta — how many rating points that single answer added or removed (can be negative).
• The band your topic mastery now sits in: Needs work, Developing or Strong.

This is a live view of the same mastery system described in How mastery works.

The session summary

When you finish (or run out of questions), Practice shows a summary card:

The summary is computed live on your device from the answers in this session; it is not a stored "score" — Practice has no saved results table (that is what Mock exams are for).

Mock exams (timed)

Mock exams live at /app/mock. A mock is a timed, single-best-answer paper sat under exam conditions: you get all questions up front, no marking or rationale until you submit, a countdown clock, and a pass/fail result at the end.

The mock landing page

The landing page states the fixed format and lists your past results.

The Start a mock button takes you to /app/mock/take. Below it, Your results shows your last mocks.

Your results table

The results table lists up to your 20 most recent mocks that had at least one answer recorded, newest first.

If you have never sat a mock, you see: "No mocks yet. Sit your first when you're ready — it's the best readiness check there is."

How a mock paper is built

Unlike Practice, a mock is a blind random draw, not adaptive:

Every mock is a fresh random selection, so difficulty is not tuned to you — that is deliberate, because a mock is meant to simulate the real exam, not coach you.

Sitting a mock

While the mock is in progress you see an exam bar, a question grid, one question at a time, and navigation controls.

You can leave a question blank — it is not required. Any question you never answer is submitted with an empty choice and scored as incorrect. To quit without a score, use the Abandon this mock link at the bottom; this returns you to the mock list and records nothing (an abandoned mock never appears in your results because it has no answers).

Marking and the result screen

When you submit (or the clock runs out), CLIP marks the whole paper at once and shows the result:

The review

Below the result, "Review — the answer to every question" lists all 15 questions. For each, you see:

• A header: "Q3 · Contract law · correct / incorrect / not answered".
• The question stem.
• Every option with its rationale. The correct answer is marked "— correct answer.", your choice (if different) is marked "— your answer.", and the correct option is highlighted green while a wrong choice you made is highlighted separately.

Showing the rationale for every option — including why each wrong option is wrong — is deliberate: that is where most of the learning in a mock actually sits.

How mastery works (Elo)

Both Practice and Mock answers feed the same per-topic mastery system. CLIP keeps one mastery rating per topic per learner, using an Elo model (the same maths as chess ratings).

The mechanics:

Your rating maps to one of three bands shown around the app:

The adaptive Practice selector reads these ratings to decide what to serve you next: lower-rated (weaker) topics are favoured, and it aims questions at a difficulty just above your current level rather than the extremes. So the more you practise, the more precisely CLIP targets your weak spots.

The two banks: course vs sample

There are two question banks, and it helps to know which you are drilling:

In Practice you choose one bank at a time via the filter bar. In a mock, CLIP automatically blends both — your course questions and the sample bank together — before drawing your 15.

Who sees which questions (entitlement)

CLIP is careful about which questions reach you, both so you only see relevant material and so answer keys never leak.

• As a learner (CANDIDATE), you only get questions from your own tenant, and only for courses you are actively enrolled in (an enrolment that has not expired), plus the shared sample bank. Another course's or another tenant's questions never appear.
• Answer keys and rationales are never sent to your device until you commit an answer — in Practice they come back only with your marked answer; in a mock they arrive only in the post-submission review. A hand-crafted request for a question you are not entitled to is rejected, so it cannot be used to farm answers.
• Staff accounts (non-learner roles) are scoped to their tenant but not restricted to enrolled courses.

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