KROK Trainer started from a very practical need.
Preparing for the KROK examinations means working through a large number of questions, understanding recurring concepts, identifying weak areas and, perhaps most importantly, learning from mistakes. There are several resources available to students, but I wanted something different: a simple study environment that could bring these activities together without putting essential tools behind a subscription.
So I started building KROK Trainer.
What began as a straightforward question trainer has gradually grown into a broader study platform for KROK 1 and KROK 2 — and the principle behind it has remained the same:
KROK Trainer should be free to use and open to inspection.
More than a question bank
KROK Trainer is designed around active practice.
Students can work through questions in Practice Mode, simulate exams, review mistakes and revisit completed sessions. Registered users can keep their Exam History, analyse their performance, identify weaker subjects and build a personal study library with My Notes.
Features such as AI Explain can provide additional reasoning when a question or answer needs clarification, while Exam by Year makes it possible to work through complete historical KROK 1 question sets.
Behind these visible features, a significant part of the project has also been dedicated to something less noticeable but equally important: the quality of the question database itself.
Older KROK datasets collected from different sources can contain OCR errors, formatting problems, corrupted terminology and, occasionally, questionable answer keys. For this reason, KROK Trainer has undergone a conservative database review process in which corrections are evaluated carefully rather than automatically rewriting medical content.
The goal is not simply to have more questions.
It is to make the questions we already have more reliable.
Why open source?
KROK Trainer is an independent project, and its source code is publicly available.
Open source makes the development process more transparent. Anyone interested in how the application works can inspect the code, follow its evolution or report problems.
It also reflects the philosophy behind the project.
Educational software does not necessarily need to become another recurring subscription. Building and maintaining software has real costs, but access to the core learning tools in KROK Trainer should not depend on whether a student pays for them.
That means there is no premium question bank and no paid version that unlocks the “real” application.
The same KROK Trainer is available to everyone.
Built from real studying
KROK Trainer is not a commercial education company or an official product of a university or examination authority.
It is an independent project developed by a medical student who also uses it to study.
That distinction matters.
Many features have appeared because of problems encountered during actual preparation: losing an unfinished session, wanting to understand why an answer was wrong, needing to find personal notes again, seeing which subjects consistently perform poorly, or wanting to practise a complete historical paper instead of another randomly generated exam.
The development roadmap continues to follow the same principle: features should solve real study problems rather than simply make the application larger.
Some ideas will work. Others may change after being tested in real use. And some may never make it into the application.
That is part of developing the project openly.
Where KROK Trainer is going
The platform will continue to evolve gradually.
Future work will focus primarily on improving the study experience, expanding useful learning tools and continuing to improve the reliability of the underlying material.
One area currently being explored, for example, is contextual anatomy support: automatically recognizing anatomical terminology inside questions and allowing students to quickly open a concise explanation of the structure without leaving their study session.
Other improvements will come from the same place many existing features came from: actually using KROK Trainer and discovering where studying with it can be better.
There is no need to turn the platform into an enormous collection of features.
The objective is simpler:
make KROK Trainer increasingly useful for preparing for the KROK exams while keeping it focused, accessible and reliable.
Free does not mean cost-free
Keeping KROK Trainer free does not mean that operating the project has no cost.
The domain, infrastructure and external services used by some features have operating expenses. Certain functionality — particularly services involving external APIs — can also create usage-based costs as the number of users grows.
For now, these costs are kept deliberately small and are covered personally.
This is also why the project is designed with sustainability in mind: features that can work locally do not need a server simply because one is available, and external services should be used when they provide genuine value.
The objective is to keep the project technically simple enough that remaining free is realistic.
Supporting the project
There is no requirement to financially support KROK Trainer.
Using the platform, reporting a broken question, suggesting an improvement, sharing it with another student or contributing to the open-source project are all meaningful ways of helping it grow.
For those who use KROK Trainer and would like to contribute toward its running costs and future development, voluntary support is also available through Buy Me a Coffee.
A contribution does not unlock additional questions, features or privileges.
It simply helps keep the same platform available to everyone.
KROK Trainer is free. The source is open. The project continues.
KROK Trainer began as a small tool built to solve a personal study problem.
Today, other students can use it too.
Wherever the project goes next, I want to preserve the principle that made it worth building in the first place:
create something genuinely useful for studying, keep improving it, and make it accessible to anyone who needs it.