AI Coach & Hint System
How the two-tier hint system works, error classification, and how error analysis builds your personal error fingerprint over time.
Passive reading is penalised at the architectural level. When you log an incorrect answer, the AI Coach activates. Rather than immediately revealing the solution, it presents a structured two-tier intervention designed to force active reasoning.
Tier 1: Guided Hint
Tier 1 gives directional guidance generated from the question's topic tag and your detected error type. It activates the reasoning chain you missed without revealing the answer; bridging the gap after Tier 1 signals a momentary block, not a conceptual gap.
Tier 1 provides directional guidance without revealing the answer. The prompt is dynamically generated based on the question's topic tag and the specific error type detected in your response. Examples: 'Consider what happens at boundary values when x approaches zero.' Or: 'Check whether the exclusion condition in row 3 is bidirectional or unidirectional.'
Tier 1 hints are designed to activate the reasoning chain you should have used, not to summarise the solution. If you can bridge the gap after a Tier 1 hint, your reasoning is retrievable; it was a momentary block, not a conceptual gap.
Tier 2: Answer Reveal
Tier 2 reveals the complete step-by-step solution, highlighting the exact divergence point between the correct approach and your attempt; both tiers are logged to telemetry and appear in the session summary.
Tier 2 shows the complete solution with step-by-step reasoning, including the specific point where the correct approach diverges from your submitted answer. Both tiers are logged to your Telemetry profile. Hint usage counts appear in your session summary.
Error Classification
Every incorrect attempt is tagged Conceptual Gap, Execution Error, or Trap Distractor, with sub-types like Trap Negation, Root Cause Mismatch, and Calculation Error. These tags, not cosmetics, drive the spaced-repetition trigger logic.
After every incorrect attempt (with or without hints), the AI Coach tags the error with a Distractor Error Type: Conceptual Gap (the underlying principle was unknown), Execution Error (the principle was known but a calculation or logical step failed), or Trap: Distractor (a specifically engineered wrong answer exploited a predictable reasoning shortcut).
Sub-types include: Trap: Negation (a logically negated version of the correct answer), Root Cause Mismatch (a downstream effect selected instead of the cause), and Calculation Error (sign errors, boundary failures, unit mismatches). These tags are not cosmetic; they are the input to the SRS trigger logic.
AI-Generated Content Transparency
All AI-authored content (hints, error classifications, prompts) carries an AI-Generated badge as a standing transparency requirement, so you always know when feedback is machine-authored.
Every AI-generated piece of content visible to you, including hints, error classifications, and AI-generated prompts, is labeled with an AI-Generated badge. This is a transparency requirement, not optional. You should always know when you are receiving machine-authored feedback.