BrightPath Learning
BrightPath: Practice tutor for exam prep cohorts
A practice tutor that helps exam-prep cohorts get guided explanations and spaced review without replacing teachers.
Education
Challenge
Problem space
Exam-prep cohorts needed reliable after-hours help without inventing answers outside the curriculum.
Business impact
Tutor burnout from repetitive questions and uneven student progress between sessions.
Solution direction
Retrieval-augmented answers from approved materials only, with coach visibility and clear escalation to a human.
Solution
We built a course-grounded tutor with retrieval over approved materials, session history for coaches, and guardrails that refuse off-syllabus answers.
What we shipped
- Course-grounded practice chat
- Cited source snippets
- Coach session review
- Escalation to human tutor
- Evaluation logging
Architecture
Ground first, generate second. Every answer cites retrieved chunks; unknown topics escalate instead of guessing.
Student app -> Tutor API -> Retrieval over course packs -> LLM with guardrails -> Coach dashboard -> Evaluation logs
Learner surface
Practice chat, topic filters, and saved explanations.
AI services
Chunk retrieval, prompt assembly, refusal rules, and logging.
Coach tools
Session review, stuck topics, and handoff notes.
Engineering challenges
Keeping answers on syllabus
Friction
General models drift into unrelated advice.
Solution
Mandatory retrieval gate plus refusal template when no relevant chunks score above threshold.
Coach trust
Friction
Teachers needed to review what the tutor said.
Solution
Session transcripts with cited sources and an escalate-to-coach path.
Outcomes
After-hours support
- Before
- Tutors repeating FAQ answers in chat
- After
- Grounded tutor for routine clarifications
- Impact
- Coaches focus live time on harder cases
Answer trust
- Before
- Open-ended chatbot risk
- After
- Syllabus-bound retrieval with citations
- Impact
- Fewer off-topic or invented explanations
Technology
Product
- Next.js
- TypeScript
AI
- LLM API
- Vector retrieval
Backend
- Node.js
- PostgreSQL
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