The Education Hub: Practice First, Then Real Papers

Signed in on My Path, Education is a page, not a personality-test URL. You go to /education. The eyebrow says Education. The line under the title says Practice. Learn. Master. Then two shelves, in that order: Practice, then Exams.

Practice is first by design. Someone without a specific exam in mind is the common case. The Exams shelf asks you to pick a paper. Most people arriving here needed a drill at a band, not a country and a year. This article walks the page as a user — what you see, what you can start, what is locked, and why Kangaroo is on Practice even though the items came from real papers.

If you wanted the product distinction from For Me and IQ, start with Education on My Path. If you wanted sitting controls in detail, practice tests vs exam papers. This is the hub itself.

What you see when you are not entitled

Education is subscription-only. For Me (€4.99) and Around Me (€9.99) include zero Education. Student (€9.99/month, no trial) and Monthly (€19.99, 7-day trial at €1.99) include unlimited sittings. GBP mirrors EUR (£4.99 / £9.99 / £19.99). PLN has its own ladder: zł24.99 / 49.99 / 99.99.

If your plan does not include Education, /education does not start a sitting and fail at question 12. You get the upgrade screen: Education is part of Student. Practice, exam mocks and AI explanations are included with the Student and Premium plans. The button goes to /premium. Get Student — €9.99/month, if that is the plan you actually need.

Signup grace does not open this page’s bank. A For Me trial does not. Tokens do not. The sitting is the entitlement; AI on a sitting is what tokens meter afterwards.

Student is For Me personality tests plus Education. No People, no child profiles, no priority support. Around Me is the other €9.99 shape. They are alternatives, not a ladder. Student vs For Me vs Around Me and the Student plan are the plan articles; the hub assumes you already picked.

Personality results elsewhere in the cabinet stay free to read. This page is not those results.

Practice first: the live cards

With Student or Monthly, the first shelf is Practice. Hint: drill the bank, or a competition, at your own pace. Live cards:

Each live card is a Practice card: title, item count, then rows for Grade or Level, complexity, topics, and 10 / 20 / 60. Default 20. Start practice at the bottom.

Maths axis is Grade (3–4 through 11–12). Language axis is Level (CEFR A1–C2). One band per sitting. Ticking several grades rolls one band; it does not mix. The API refuses a mixed pool (grade_required). Why grade bands matter is the reason — Kangaroo’s easy is a task-number third, identical across ages, so a mixed “easy” would mix a nine-year-old warm-up with a school-leaver warm-up.

Topics are a closed list. Mixed Problems is the label for items that should not wear a fake keyword. Complexity on the card is easy / medium / hard inside the band.

Language on the card, where a bank has locales, is a picker on that card — not a page-level switch — because two cards can want different languages and the picker constrains that card’s bands.

If the current picks cannot fill 20, 20 mutes. If nothing matches, Start practice disables. The card is telling you before you waste a sitting.

Start practice opens a session, not a new marketing page. The session is where timer, feedback mode, free vs forward-only navigation, skip (“I don’t know”), and flag live. The hub card does not cram every control onto the tile — size and band belong on the card because they define the pool; timer and feedback belong inside because they define how you meet that pool. If you wanted the full control list, practice tests vs exam papers is the sitting article. On the hub, your job is: pick the test, pick the band, pick 10 / 20 / 60, start.

A first visit should leave topics wide. The topic row is real — unticking is how you drill Geometry only — but you cannot see which cards are red until you have sat once. Wide, one band, 20, immediate feedback. Then the topic grid below the shelves has something to show.

Why Kangaroo is on Practice

Math Kangaroo is built from real past-paper items. An older layout inferred shelf from “does this bank pin an exam family?” and filed Kangaroo under Exams. That was the wrong activity.

Nobody sits Kangaroo the way they sit a leaving exam. People drill it: a band, a topic, 20 questions, maybe a timer. On Exams it carried a different card — timer, Short/Normal/Full, a bare play button — while General Math beside it offered 10 / 20 / 60 and Start practice. Two UIs for the same choice.

It lives on Practice so it shares one card shape with General Math and the languages. You can still use exam-mode timer inside the sitting. You are still not in the official contest. We are not affiliated with Math Kangaroo / Kangourou sans Frontières.

Scoring when you pull contest-weighted items: 3/4/5 by paper third, start-on-task-count, no wrong-answer penalty because editions disagree. A 20-question drill is not a 24- or 30-task paper unless you configured a full-size pull. Pictures matter; some items are the diagram.

Practice first, then, is not “Kangaroo is unofficial so it is lesser.” It is “Kangaroo is a drill.” Real papers, when they exist on this site, sit on the second shelf with the paper’s own clock.

Exams: the second shelf, currently empty of live names

Hint: real past papers, sat the way the exam runs. That is the contract for this shelf.

Today there are no live named qualifications on it. SAT, GCSE, TOEFL, IELTS, Abitur, and E8 are not available. Physics is not available. Do not name those as something you can start. Do not treat a 60-question General Math sitting as a substitute paper with a secret badge.

The page will not invent a mock to fill the section. If the shelf has no live rows, you work from Practice. That is honest. “Practice first, then real papers” is an order of operations, not a promise that the papers are one scroll away this month.

When an exam family is live, it gets an exam card: the paper’s controls, not 10 / 20 / 60. Until then, do not hunt for a hidden SAT tile among the practice cards. There isn’t one you can sit.

Locked cards are Off, not live

A card can render three ways: locked when the test is Off, as an exam card when real papers back it, or as a Practice card.

Locked cards exist. They say coming soon. They are greyed. They have a Notify me button, not a grade picker. A grade picker on a card the API would refuse with test_off is an invitation to a click it cannot honour. Notify me is a demand signal: which Off tests people actually want, instead of us guessing from the order banks were easiest to source.

If you see a lock, it is not available. Do not build a term around it. Do not write it on a timetable. The live catalogue is the six Practice tests above. Interest counts (“n people are waiting”) are not a release date.

This article will not list Off names as if they were a menu. The fact you need is: locked means Off; Off is not a sitting; SAT and the other named qualifications are not live.

Below the shelves: topics, mastery, light gamification

The hub is also a map of topics. Cards per topic: closed-vocabulary label, mastery bar (grey / red / amber / green), complexity dots 1–5, streak if you have one. Topic master at 80% mastery.

This is how you build a study plan without a spreadsheet. Red bars are the week. Retry wrong after a sitting is the second session. The AI gap report is a token spend on that sitting’s pattern, not a tutor.

Badges exist (first lesson, perfect score, 7-day streak, topic master, exam ready, polyglot). They are not why the shelves are in this order. Do not arrive at /education to hunt badges and then wonder where the SAT paper is.

A review-queue card for spaced repetition exists in the product and is not the thing you should look for on day one. The engine can run; the hub’s valuable slot is the Practice cards and the topic bars. Sit those.

Bookmarks, if you use them, are a drill list, not a second catalogue.

Subject tabs, when you are looking at topics, follow the live banks: maths and the four languages. Physics, chemistry, and biology names may exist in locale files; they are not live tests you can start. Do not treat a subject label as a promise. The Practice shelf is the promise.

If the page errors (“Could not load education data”), that is a load failure, not an empty catalogue. Refresh. If it still fails, you do not have a sitting, and you should not invent one from memory of a screenshot.

A first visit, in order

Confirm Student or Monthly. If not, /premium, then come back.
Read Practice. Ignore locked cards for planning.
Pick one live card that matches what you actually need to drill — a language at a CEFR level, General Math at a grade, or Kangaroo at a grade.
Tick one Level or Grade. Leave topics wide unless you already know the weak card.
Leave size at 20 unless the pool cannot pay it.
Start practice. In the sitting, pick timer and feedback for the job: immediate if the topic is new, review-at-end if you are pressure-testing. Skip is “I don’t know.” Flag what you distrust.
On review: score, correct / wrong / skipped. Retry wrong the same day. Optionally generate a gap report if you have tokens.
Back on the hub, read the topic bars. Tomorrow is a red card, same band.

That loop is Education. The Exams shelf is there so that when a real paper is on, you will not have to be taught a second information architecture. Practice stays first so a learner without a paper still has a place to start.

A second visit should not repeat step 3 as if the hub were new. Read the bars first. If algebra went red and geometry barely moved, the next card is still General Math or Kangaroo, same grade, algebra ticked, 10 or 20, retry wrong after. The hub is a dashboard after week one, even though week one it felt like a storefront.

If you came from For Me looking for another free results page, you will not find one here. Personality results are free; Education sittings need Student or Monthly. The upgrade screen is the hub telling you that, once. After you have the plan, the shelves are the product.

What the hub will not do

It will not mix grades. It will not open on For Me or Around Me. It will not play audio. It will not speak. It will not affiliate you with Cambridge or Kangourou sans Frontières. It will not treat IQ as a topic card — IQ stays under For Me. It will not sell you a sitting per attempt; unlimited is the Student/Monthly deal.

It will not quietly add SAT as a live exam because the word is familiar. Named qualifications that are Off stay Off until they are On in the public catalogue.

English only in this article; the cabinet has other locales, but the banks are the four languages plus maths, not “every subject in school.”

Open the page as it actually is

Practice first, then real papers. Live practice: six tests. Kangaroo is a drill. Locked cards are Off. Exams has no live named qualifications to start.

Go to /education and start a Practice sitting at one band. If you still need the plan that includes the bank, /premium — Student at €9.99/month, or Monthly at €19.99 if you want the rest of the cabinet with it.