Question Review: A New Smarterer Way to Learn

Everywhere you look, there are new ways to learn on and offline. We’re in the midst of a massive trend towards lifelong learning – a trend that has empowered people with unprecedented choices about when, where, and how to learn. With so many ways to learn, people need a simple way to benchmark their skills and track their progress as they improve their skills.

Until now, Smarterer has focused primarily on helping you quantify your skills. Public profile pages, badges, and competitive leaderboards helped you show what you know. But time and again, we heard from the community that you want to use Smarterer in a more private way, to track your progress against your learning goals. You told us that you want to review questions and use Smarterer tests to improve your skills, not just to prove them.

So we listened.

Today we’re rolling out three major new product enhancements that will better enable you to learn with Smarterer:

• Improved Test Flow: One of Smarterer’s greatest assets is the ability to calibrate someone’s score in under 20 questions (think 60 seconds or so!). Where before, many people continued answering an endless supply of questions with the hope of improving scores, we now message you as soon as we’re able to accurately assess your skill level, creating a clear end to each test session.
• Question Review: Since launching, we’ve heard that people value Smarterer test questions as a way to expand their knowledge. Following each test session, we now promptly move you into a new mode where you can review every question, learning from right and wrong responses.
• Continuous Benchmarking: Keeping each individual’s personal learning path in mind, our new user flow enables you to return over time to reassess your skills as you learn. With so many new learning options available (from EdX to Udemy to Skillshare), this becomes an essential tool for measuring the impact of different types of curriculum.

In support of this shift from external recognition to private validation, we’ve also replaced public profiles with a personal dashboard to house these new learning tools. From the first day you create an account, your scores are private by default.

This new learning-focused experience comes close on the heels of our decision to remove leaderboards from the site. We found that users didn’t want to compete with each other nearly as much as with themselves, while using Smarterer to direct their learning. For those among you who thrive on being at the top, we’ve introduced your skill rank in the dashboard, letting you know exactly how your skills stack up–you can still see just exactly how much Smarterer you are than the rest of the pack!

We hope you’ll dive in to explore these new tools. This is just the first step in our evolution toward fostering learning. Stay tuned for more game-changing builds in the near future. And of course, let us know if you have any suggestions–we’re listening.