College Readiness Preparation Apps
The reason these apps exist is an afternoon years ago, when I was volunteering with the Bilingual Homework Hotline, an after-school tutoring program I help support. I sat with a high school student who had recently arrived from a Spanish-speaking country. His homework was all in English. He had no support in his first language. He was not unable to understand the material; he could not yet access it through the language it was being offered in. When we worked through the concept together in Spanish, the relief on his face stayed with me long after the session ended.
That moment is why I built Verónica. She does not give students answers and she does not study for them. She is a tutor who is fluent in their first language whenever they need her to be, grounded in expert-verified content, and patient and available at any hour. The technology only became real recently: large language models are multilingual by nature, retrieval-augmented generation keeps her grounded in verified college-readiness content rather than improvising, and on-the-fly translation means a single source of truth can reach a student in whichever language opens the concept up for them. I built her first for the pre-service teachers I had spent years preparing, and now also for the students themselves.
The two apps that emerged from this work prepare learners for two state college-readiness gateway exams. The Texas Success Initiative Assessment 2.0 (TSIA2) is the state-administered placement test that determines whether a Texas high school graduate enters college-level coursework directly or is routed into developmental coursework first. The GED is the high school equivalency credential, the gateway adult learners use to access postsecondary and workforce pathways across the country.
Products at a Glance
Web apps on a shared architecture: TSIA2 (Texas college enrollment) and GED (high school equivalency)
Expert-verified practice items combined across both apps, every one reviewed by subject-matter experts before being served
Languages Verónica is verified fluent in on TSIA2: English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Hindi, Urdu, Mandarin Chinese, and Brazilian Portuguese.
Two Exam Tracks, One Architecture
Both apps share the same frontend, backend, tutor engine, audio playback, and progress tracking. Per track: question pool, sub-skill framework, rubric, language scope, and grounding knowledge base.
TSIA2 Track
The TSIA2 placement test is the gateway exam for college enrollment in Texas. The track covers mathematics and ELAR (sentence editing, passage revision, reading comprehension, and the TSIA2 essay) with about 1,900 expert-verified items aligned to the THECB college-readiness framework. Verónica is verified fluent in eight languages so emergent bilingual students can ask, listen, and study in their stronger language.
GED Track
The GED is the high school equivalency credential, the gateway for adult learners to postsecondary and workforce pathways. The track covers all four GED subject areas (mathematical reasoning, reasoning through language arts including the Extended Response, science, and social studies) with about 1,700 expert-verified items, plus a library of interactive concept explorations.
How the Product Works
Four integrated systems work together to give each student a personalized path from first practice question to exam-day readiness.
Expert-Verified Practice Pool
Combined, the two apps serve over 3,600 practice items: about 1,900 on TSIA2 across math and ELAR, and about 1,700 on GED across mathematical reasoning, language arts, science, and social studies. Every item is generated by one AI model, independently re-solved by a second AI model, and then reviewed by subject-matter experts before it can be served. Each question maps to a specific sub-skill so students see exactly which area they are strengthening.
Verónica, the Multilingual AI Tutor
Verónica is grounded in a curated college-readiness knowledge base using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and is context-aware of the exact question the student is working on, so she can teach a concept, coach through a stuck moment, give feedback on a wrong answer, or prompt reflection without the student having to explain the problem to her. Every reply comes with both written text and natural-voice audio playback in the same language. On TSIA2, she is verified fluent in eight languages (English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Hindi, Urdu, Mandarin Chinese, and Brazilian Portuguese) so a student can ask, listen, and have a study conversation in whichever language helps them most.
AI Essay and Extended Response Evaluation
Student writing is scored against the official rubric for each exam: the TSIA2 six-dimension rubric for the persuasive essay, and the GED three-trait rubric for the Extended Response. Each piece is graded twice and the scores reconciled so what the student sees is steady and honest, returned with a holistic score, dimension-by-dimension breakdown, specific strengths, areas to work on, and a recommendation for what to practice next.
Adaptive Progress Tracking
The platform builds a live picture of each student's mastery by sub-skill, surfaces the most-missed item types in a personal mistake notebook, and brings those mistakes back for spaced review until the student demonstrates the skill. Students always know what to study next.
Technical Approach
A custom-built, full-stack web application. Highlights of the technical decisions and techniques behind the product.
Frontend
- ✓ Mobile-first single-page application built with React and a utility-first design system
- ✓ Slide-up tutor panel with multilingual chat interface and per-message audio playback
- ✓ Single sign-on flow from the storefront so students go from purchase to practice in one click
Backend
- ✓ Python API server exposing a versioned REST surface
- ✓ Server-side question delivery and scoring to protect content integrity
- ✓ Postgres data layer with student profiles, attempts, and mastery snapshots
AI & Data
- ✓ Retrieval-augmented generation over a verified college-readiness knowledge base, scoped per app so content does not leak across exams
- ✓ Multi-pass evaluation for essays and Extended Responses with score reconciliation to improve stability
- ✓ Multilingual prompt design with safety guardrails, plus natural-voice text-to-speech so the tutor can read every reply aloud in the same language
- ✓ Sub-skill performance modeling and a mistake notebook with spaced review that drive personalized recommendations
Verónica is the AI tutor inside this product
Verónica is the same tutoring system that powers all of my AI-powered learning products. See how the architecture, knowledge base, and pedagogical design come together.
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