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 for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, Antigravity, Gemini CLI and 40+ agents
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:

🌟 Featured & Curated By

Universal Exam Cram Coach is officially indexed and recommended across major AI agent ecosystems:

• Awesome Claude Code (56k+ ⭐) — The premier curated directory for Claude Code; featured in Documentation, Knowledge & Learning (manually approved by maintainer).
• Awesome Agent Skills (36k+ ⭐) — The cross-ecosystem directory for AI agent skills; featured in Community Skills · Specialized Domains.
• Awesome Gemini CLI — Curated tools and skills for Google Gemini CLI.

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 1,600 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

Recommended: one command. It needs Node.js 18 or newer for npx (check with node --version):

npx skills add ZeKaiNie/universal-examprep-skill
pip install pypdfium2

The first command asks which agents to set up (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, Antigravity, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot and 40+ others) and whether to install for this project or for your user account (-g). It copies one folder, universal-exam-cram-coach/: 13 files, about 150 KB, and the tool inside runs offline. Update later with npx skills update.

Claude Code plugin (alternative; no Node.js needed). Type these in Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add ZeKaiNie/universal-examprep-skill
/plugin install universal-exam-cram-coach@exam-cram-coach

Or ask your agent to do it. Paste this; it may ask you to approve running the commands:

Install the Exam Cram Coach skill for this agent: run `npx skills add ZeKaiNie/universal-examprep-skill --skill universal-exam-cram-coach` (the CLI detects you and installs for you), then run `pip install pypdfium2`, then run `python <installed folder>/coach.py doctor` and show me its output.

Offline install from the release zip, and the skills folder of each agent

Download universal-exam-cram-coach-flash.zip and SHA256SUMS.txt from the latest release, check the checksum, and unzip into your agent's skills folder:

sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS.txt          # macOS: shasum -a 256 -c SHA256SUMS.txt

On Windows, certutil -hashfile universal-exam-cram-coach-flash.zip SHA256 prints the hash to compare with SHA256SUMS.txt.

You should end up with …/skills/universal-exam-cram-coach/SKILL.md and …/skills/universal-exam-cram-coach/coach.py.

To check the install from any terminal (use your agent's folder from the table):

python ~/.claude/skills/universal-exam-cram-coach/coach.py doctor

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

Installed an earlier Flash version? Versions 5.0 and 5.1 installed as exam-cram-coach and copied the whole repository (about 12 MB). Run npx skills remove exam-cram-coach (add -g if you installed it for your user account, or delete that folder), then install again as above. Your study workspaces are separate and stay as they are. The name universal-exam-cram-coach used to install the v4.3 full edition; npx skills update now brings Flash, and npx skills add ZeKaiNie/universal-examprep-skill --skill universal-exam-cram-coach-full keeps v4.3 (how to update it).

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