Who we are

We are an independent team building serious, honest study tools for civil-service exams. That is the whole mission: prep that respects your time, tells you the truth about what the exam is, and shows you exactly where you stand.

Today that means 11 exams in New York, set by the New York State court system, New York City’s Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) and MTA New York City Transit.

We started with the New York State Court Officer-Trainee exam because it is a high-stakes, ranked exam where a few points change how many years a candidate waits for the call — and because the existing options are a shelf of generic books and expensive classroom courses that cannot time your memory or grade your standing. That gap is where a well-built product actually helps.

Every fact on our exam pages — filing and test dates, fees, eligibility, pay, what the test covers — is read from the agency’s own exam notice or official page. Each guide page lists the sources it was written from and the date we last checked them.

We keep a dated copy of every notice we cite. Agencies sometimes reissue a notice with changes and no announcement, so when a new edition appears we compare it line by line with the one before and update our pages where the two differ.

When a notice does not say something — the number of questions on an exam, for example — we say so plainly instead of filling the gap, and show you how we made our own decision. Our practice questions are original; how we write and check them is on our methodology page.

If anything here disagrees with your notice, the notice is right. Write to [email protected] and we will check it against the source.