Amazing Resource!

[johncmunson]

I'm currently studying for the OAR and was really excited to come across this!

I'm curious... what was your methodology for crawling/scraping the raw content out of the Kyle/Gomez drives and then generating example problems? I'm assuming LLMs were used extensively, which is fine by me, but I'm just wondering what sort of quality control was put in place.

I'm asking because many of the study guides you come across online, or on Amazon, aren't always the highest quality and it can really be a time waste trying to figure out why you got a problem wrong... just to find out that the book was wrong!

Anyways, thanks so much for this study resource! Amazing idea and so much more useful than a book or chaotic GDrive. After taking the exam next week, I might see if there's any opportunity to contribute to this project and help improve it.

[johncmunson]

I'm three days into studying now. The first day was with books and random Kyle/Gomez material. The second two days have been with the site you built.

So here's some early feedback... the site you've built is soooo much more effective. I've been making note of a few very minor things here and there of small features or improvements that would be cool. But, honestly man, you absolutely crushed it. This study resource is incredible.

[johncmunson]

I got a 65 on my OAR! I honestly don't think I would've scored that well without the site you built. Truly, this is hands down the best OAR resource out there.

[IndexDuo]

Just saw this! @johncmunson

I'm curious... what was your methodology for crawling/scraping the raw content out of the Kyle/Gomez drives and then generating example problems? I'm assuming LLMs were used extensively, which is fine by me, but I'm just wondering what sort of quality control was put in place.

I initially built the site just for myself to prep for the OAR. There was a lot of manual work involved like downloading and cropping the PDFs, using adobe acrobat to clean them up and scan for text, and LLM (ChatGPT and Claude) to generate the learn page and question banks.

Because I needed to study it myself, it won't be helpful if I can't understand the concepts. There was a lot of back and forth with the AI. For example, after it generates the "learn page" that teaches me the topic, I'll use it to learn the concept myself, and if I struggle (which happens very often) I go back to the AI and let it know that "hey this part is worded very confusingly and I'm still not understanding it. Can you explain more thoroughly in simple terms like if I'm stupid?" Most of the "learn page" went through several versions till it became good enough to help me understand everything (probability & combinatorics was the toughest one for me).

At first, it wasn't a web tool, I just kept having conversations with ChatGPT/Claude to teach me through their web interface. I figured that it'd be useful to make it a web tool because I kept forgetting the previous concepts after learning the next one lol. I wanted something that can track my studying progress and also refresh my memory on the topics I've learned awhile ago.

For the question banks, I extracted the questions from the PDFs (Kyle/Gomez) after Acrobat scanned it for text, fed it to LLM and told "here are some questions from the oar practice tests, please read through them, understand which topic each belongs to, and generate me similar questions using different scenarios and numbers." The instructions I gave to LLM were much detailed than that because I like to give a lot of examples. I personally prefer using the voice input feature, so I'd just talk my ideas out loud and send it to LLM.

I'm asking because many of the study guides you come across online, or on Amazon, aren't always the highest quality and it can really be a time waste trying to figure out why you got a problem wrong... just to find out that the book was wrong!

THISSS!! It happened so often, and I was so glad to have a private 1-1 tutor (ChatGPT) to help me clear things up. The tool was initially build for all 3 parts of the OAR. However, I removed mechanical and reading comprehension before publishing it to the public because the tool didn't really help me a lot with these 2 parts. When I was going through the study guide from Kyle/Gomez, I'd often encounter a question with the wrong answer assigned to it (mostly mechanical questions). At that point, I'd start questioning if I'm understanding this concept incorrectly because I'm not getting it and the answer+explanation is making ZERO sense. That's when the textbook is slowwwwly losing my trust. I'm no pro in any section of the OAR, but if the material generated by AI can teach me correctly, it can teach anyone -- this was basically my rationale for sharing this tool online. Since I also scored a pretty high score on the test (we both got a 65!!!), it tells me that the quality of the tool is not bad at all!

Also, since I've spent a few years studying web design, it kind of helps not making the site just an AI slop (that's the first hateful comment I got from a redditor after making the post lol). My mentality is like
I have an issue -> I want to solve the issue -> let me build a tool that solves it -> the tool worked really well and I got a really good result! I should share it with everyone else!

I didn't mind the UXUI part of it when I was the only user, but then after publishing it, I made a few UX enhancement, and recently I've completed a sanity check to make sure the questions are all routed correctly to the right topic (this part was messed up when I removed the other 2 sections from the tool).

Also this is a copy of an older version of the actual site I chose to make public. The current version does live in a private repo (the one with a few more ux enhancements). Just in case if you notice this version looks a bit different.

Definitely feel free to share your success on r/newtothenavy/air warrior or recommend the tool to someone else that's also prepping for the OAR. I appreciate any exposure! and sorry about the long response and delayed reply. lemme know if you have any other question! so happy for you <333