universal-examprep-skill

Exam Cram Coach · Flash

An AI exam-prep tutor for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, Antigravity and Gemini CLI: drop in your lecture slides, notes, homework and past papers, and it teaches chapter by chapter with page citations, shows the figures, quizzes you with your own questions, tracks mistakes, and builds your cheat sheet.

English · 中文

# One-command install (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Antigravity, Windsurf, etc.)
npx skills add zekainie/universal-examprep-skill

One command to set up · Teaches from your files · Shows the figures · Quizzes from your homework · Never hides what it made up

Exam Cram Coach is an Agent Skill plus one small Python tool. You give a coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, Antigravity, Gemini CLI, …) the folder with your lecture slides, notes, homework and past papers. It is engineered with three core technical differentiators:

1. 🎯 100% Grounded & Anti-Hallucination: Every taught concept cites exact file p.N references; out-of-scope queries exit with non-zero status to strictly prevent fabrication (100% out-of-scope abstention); transparent 🟢/🟡/⚠️ provenance tags distinguish materials from AI commentary.
2. 🧠 Cross-Session Persistent Memory: Maintains state locally in study_state.json and a mistake log without external vector databases or token bloat. Close your chat and resume anytime with coach.py status; mistakes are prioritized in spaced re-quizzing.
3. ⚡ High-End Performance on Cheap / Weak Models: Deterministic CLI output with 📍 next command hints and automated vector-figure cropping (pypdfium2). Benchmarked on 1,000+ pages of real college probability notes: Gemini Flash-Lite and Claude Haiku achieve zero command fabrication, zero phantom citations, and publication-grade figure presentations (see Weak Model Benchmark).

Core workflow:

• reads PDF / PPTX / DOCX / Markdown / TXT / HTML and splits the course into chapters;
• cuts the figures out of the lecture notes and the printed questions and solutions, so it can put the right picture in front of you while it explains;
• pulls the real questions and reference answers out of homework and exams (matches hw2.pdf with hw2solutions.pdf, and “Problem 1.3.10” with its solution);
• teaches chapter by chapter in plain words, quizzes only with those questions, tracks mistakes, and compiles a concise cheat sheet;
• labels every sentence so you always know where it came from:

Two editions, pick one

The rest of this page is about Flash: setup takes seconds even for a whole course, the whole skill is about 1,100 words, the study loop is seven commands, and it works with small models (tested with Gemini flash-lite and Claude Haiku). A feature-by-feature comparison is in Flash vs. the full edition.

Contents

1. Start studying in five minutes
2. What a study session looks like
3. Preparing your materials
4. Flash vs. the full edition
5. What ends up in the exam-cram/ folder
6. Command reference
7. Measured results
8. FAQ
9. For developers

Start studying in five minutes

Step 0 · What you need

• A coding agent with a terminal: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, Antigravity, Gemini CLI, or any other agent that can run shell commands and read files. For PDF-heavy courses prefer the desktop app or IDE version of your agent: terminals often cannot display the figures.
• Python 3.8 or newer. Check with python --version. On Windows, install it from python.org and tick Add python.exe to PATH.
• Optional but recommended: pip install pypdfium2. It gives PDF text extraction and figure cropping. Without it, PDFs are listed as “needs pypdfium2” and everything else (PPTX, DOCX, Markdown, TXT) still works.

Step 1 · Install the skill

Easiest: let the agent do it. Copy this to your agent; it may ask you to approve network access or writing to its skills folder:

Install the Exam Cram Coach skill: download exam-cram-coach-flash.zip from the latest release at https://github.com/ZeKaiNie/universal-examprep-skill/releases/latest (or git clone the repository) and put it in your user-level skills directory so that SKILL.md and coach.py end up in a folder named exam-cram-coach. Back up any older copy first. Then run `pip install pypdfium2` and `python <that folder>/coach.py doctor`, and report the install path and the doctor output.

Per-host versions:

Install or update https://github.com/ZeKaiNie/universal-examprep-skill into ~/.claude/skills/exam-cram-coach (SKILL.md and coach.py must be directly inside that folder). Ask before overwriting an existing copy. Then run `pip install pypdfium2` and `python ~/.claude/skills/exam-cram-coach/coach.py doctor` and show me the result.

Install the latest Exam Cram Coach skill from https://github.com/ZeKaiNie/universal-examprep-skill into my Codex skills directory as exam-cram-coach (SKILL.md and coach.py directly inside). Back up any older copy. Run `pip install pypdfium2`, then `python <install path>/coach.py doctor`, report the path and the output, and tell me whether I need a new task for the skill to appear.

Fetch https://github.com/ZeKaiNie/universal-examprep-skill and install it as exam-cram-coach in my Cursor user skills directory (~/.cursor/skills/ or ~/.agents/skills/), SKILL.md and coach.py directly inside. Back up an older copy, run `pip install pypdfium2`, confirm Cursor discovers SKILL.md, and report the path.

Fetch https://github.com/ZeKaiNie/universal-examprep-skill and install it in ~/.codeium/windsurf/skills/exam-cram-coach. Ask before downloading or replacing files. Run `pip install pypdfium2`, confirm Cascade discovers SKILL.md, and report the path.

Fetch https://github.com/ZeKaiNie/universal-examprep-skill and install it in ~/.gemini/antigravity/skills/exam-cram-coach (SKILL.md and coach.py directly inside). Ask before writing outside the workspace. Run `pip install pypdfium2`, rescan skills, and report the path and `python <path>/coach.py doctor`.

gemini skills install https://github.com/ZeKaiNie/universal-examprep-skill.git
pip install pypdfium2

Manual install. Download exam-cram-coach-flash.zip and unzip it into your agent's skills folder. You should end up with …/skills/exam-cram-coach/SKILL.md and …/skills/exam-cram-coach/coach.py. Then open a terminal and run pip install pypdfium2.

To check the install from any terminal:

python path/to/exam-cram-coach/coach.py doctor

It prints the version, whether PDF support is available, and the last workspace used.

Step 2 · Put your materials in one folder

Anything goes in one folder (sub-folders are fine): slides, lecture notes, textbook chapters, homework, solutions, quizzes, past exams. See Preparing your materials for naming tips that make chapters and answers line up automatically. Your own scanned homework can stay in the folder: it is detected and never shown as an answer.

Step 3 · Send the first message

Use the Exam Cram Coach skill. My materials are in D:\Courses\Probability. The exam is in 3 days, I am starting from zero, teach me in English from chapter 1.

The agent will run one command (coach.py setup), which takes a few seconds even for a thousand pages, and reply with the chapter list, the number of questions it found, and any warning such as “3 PDFs need pip install pypdfium2” or “file X has no text, I will open it directly”. Then it starts teaching chapter 1.

Step 4 · Keep talking normally

Every reply ends with a 📍 progress line (chapter and part, quiz score, mistakes, days left, next step) copied from the tool, so a long session never loses its place.

What a study session looks like

This is what a student saw in a real session on a probability course (Gemini flash-lite, translated from Chinese). Where the transcript shows ![](…png) the chat displayed a figure that setup had cut out of the lecture PDF:

Chapter 1: Set Theory

🟢 A set is a collection of things. Capital letters name sets (A), small letters name elements (x). x ∈ A means x is an element of A, x ∉ A means it is not. (ch01.pdf p.3)