ArchivedAI application · 2024

Award-winning hackathon build

Testif.AI

Testif.AI helps teachers and students turn documents and web sources into configurable tests and answer keys. I built the AI backend, including document preparation, parallel candidate generation, and the judge stage that selects the final non-duplicate questions.

My role

AI backend engineering · HackUMBC team

Testif.AI wordmark
AI application
Award
Best Educational Hack
Overall
2nd place at HackUMBC
Pipeline
Parallel generation + judge
01

The product constraint

A useful test generator cannot simply ask for ten questions and accept the first ten lines. Users choose question type, count, difficulty, grade level, and testing philosophy, while uploaded sources arrive as PDFs, presentations, documents, text, images, or URLs.

02

Generate candidates in parallel

The backend normalizes the source material, then generates a candidate exam from each document concurrently. This preserves source coverage and avoids one long prompt becoming the only point of failure.

03

Judge the set, not each question alone

A second model stage sees the candidate pool and selects the best non-duplicate questions at the exact requested count for each question type. The judge can optimize the test as a whole instead of scoring isolated outputs with no view of redundancy.

Engineering choices

The decisions that shaped it.

The implementation details matter because each one closes a specific failure mode or keeps an important boundary visible.

01

Normalize inputs first

Every supported file and web source enters the generation pipeline through a common textual representation.

02

Parallelize by source

Independent candidates improve source coverage and keep ingestion latency bounded during the hackathon build.

03

Use a selection stage

The final model call enforces requested counts and removes duplicate or weaker questions across candidates.

Where it landed

The project won Best Educational Hack and placed second overall at HackUMBC 2024. The public repository remains available as an archived snapshot of the build.

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