Studying for Exams? There's an App For That

Dan Nguyen and Gerard D’Onofrio

(MD/MBA candidates, 2018) didn’t matriculate at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School (NJMS) with the intention of becoming tech entrepreneurs. But thanks to the Distinction Program in Entrepreneurship and Innovation, the mentorship of George Heinrich, MD, and their own hard work, that’s what’s happened. Their app, Testable, which offers students a social, competitive way to study for exams, rolled out on the iOS platform this past spring.

“The idea for Testable came from being medical students,” Nguyen says. “Trying to learn all this medical content in a short time forces you to get creative with your study habits. One of the most effective ways for me to review is in groups with my friends. We ask each other questions because we’ve found that being able to explain the correct answers to each other reinforces the material.”

Nguyen and D’Onofrio first discussed creating an app in February 2015, when they were preparing for their Step 1 exam. “It’s regarded as the most influential test score that will determine your placement in residency,” D’Onofrio explains. “Like any good medical students, Dan and I were studying ahead of time, constantly going over the review books and doing review questions, and we developed

a study method where we would throw questions at each other. We recognized pretty quickly that there was a game-like quality to it.”

But a funny thing happened en route to the App Store: med school got in the way. “From April to the end of May, Dan and I had to really buckle down and study for the Step 1 exam,” D’Onofrio says. “At the end of May, we started our third year on the floors, which was very time intensive and entirely new to us. It required a lot of acclimation that the classroom setting of the first two years didn’t. So the app got put on the back burner for a while. In December 2015 we started talking about it again.”

Nguyen and D’Onofrio wanted their app to recreate the social atmosphere of studying with your friends. “By making it competitive,” Nguyen says, “and allowing students to go head-to-head against other students, and answer real test-like questions, the app not only gives you practice, it also forces you to study actively. We wanted to make it

personal, because when you’re playing against your friends, or other students, you have some skin in the game. Your pride and your ego are involved and you tend to perform better.”

Students can use Testable to challenge each other to games of five multiple-choice questions. “If I challenge you,” D’Onofrio explains, “then I complete my five questions on my own time, and you complete your questions on your time. When we’ve both finished, we see who did better. The score, and the winner, is determined first on accuracy and then on time.” Once the game ends, students can review thorough explanations for each of their answer choices. “That’s something that sets us apart,” he adds. “Not only is our content geared toward education, but Testable encourages students to really learn the material. If you get it wrong, you don’t just go to the next game without thinking about it. You have the opportunity to go over each answer until it’s clear.”

By early 2016, Nguyen and D’Onofrio had hired a software developer and, with the help of four seniors from the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Capstone Program, they had a viable product ready for the App Store by spring. “The original idea was to

focus on medical content,” says Nguyen. “It would be for first- and second-year medical students preparing for the USMLE Step 1 board exams. However, we thought the changes in the 2016 SAT exam provided an easier entry into the test prep market and would put the other resources on the market on a clean start with us.”

More than a thousand students across New Jersey used Testable in its first two weeks, Nguyen says, but there was a small problem. “We quickly found that high school students don’t like to study unless they have to, so getting them to use resources other than what their school had provided was a bit of a challenge. We got great feedback from

teachers, and from the students who did use it, but we realized that it might be better to focus on a smaller market: specifically, medical students. They’re inherently competitive and have to study all year round.”

There’s reason to think Nguyen and D’Onofrio are on the right track: Testable has already been a hit with NJMS students. “We teamed up with Dr. Devashish Anjaria, the director of the surgery clerkship, to provide NJMS students a study application,” D’Onofrio says. “We put 210 questions that were specific to the Surgery Shelf Exam into our application.” The Surgery Shelf is a National Board of Medical Examiners standardized exam that medical students must pass to

fulfill their third-year surgery requirement. Scoring above 90 percent merits honors for the surgery rotation. “We distributed it in a beta form to all of the NJMS surgery students who had a compatible device. Dan and I actually used our own app to study for the Surgery Shelf, which was really cool.”

With the benefit of hindsight, the success of two hard-working medical students might seem inevitable (if not exactly easy). Still, having an idea for an app is one thing, bringing it to fruition is something else altogether. Fortunately for Nguyen, who grew up in Warren and graduated from The College of New Jersey, and D’Onofrio, who hails from Chatham and graduated from The University of Scranton, NJMS not only encourages creativity, it also offers students the opportunity to explore their ideas.

“Gerard and I are part of the Distinction Program in Entrepreneurship and Innovation,” Nguyen says. “We’ve been very fortunate to have a great mentor in Dr. George Heinrich. He was my mentor when I first thought about this idea, before we even developed it, and his advice about what the next step should be, or how to approach a certain problem, has been really valuable.”

Nguyen and D’Onofrio will spend the next 12 months earning MBAs at Rutgers and developing their business. “We plan to increase Testable’s medical content,” D’Onofrio says. “Our long-term goal is to have almost every standardized exam on our application for easy and convenient use.” “Our experience with this app really shows how much the NJMS administration and faculty care about their students and want them to succeed,” Nguyen says. “Just the fact that they were willing to let Gerard and me take on such a big task to try to create a company and obtain a dual degree is amazing. Everyone I’ve spoken to about Testable has been extremely supportive. NJMS will let students find their own path, and I think that’s unique to our program. I don’t know many other medical schools that would give their students this kind of freedom.”