What's new in July 18–31, 2026

By student request, you can now add a mock board sitting to any day of your study plan. Shorter timelines don't schedule all 5 mocks automatically — now the + on any calendar day lists the sittings you haven't taken yet, and tapping one puts it on that day. Finish it under Mock Boards and the calendar ticks it off by itself.

Mock board tasks on your calendar now tick themselves off even when you sit the mock ahead of its scheduled day — no more waiting for the day to arrive for the checkmark to appear.

In your Vault, tapping a topic under "Where your pile is heaviest" started a set of brand-new questions instead of the misses you went there to redo. Each row now leads with a red "Redo" chip that takes you straight to that topic's pile, with "Drill fresh" kept alongside for when you do want new material.

Your streak needs a set number of questions in a day, and nothing on screen ever said so — students who answered a few questions and still lost a streak had no way to know why. The streak tile on your dashboard now shows how many questions the day still needs, fills as you go, and marks itself once the day is safe. A flashcard review or a mock section counts the day too.

You can now have each answer choice carry its own explanation, inside the choice, instead of all of them listed below the question. It is off by default, so nothing changes unless you turn it on in Settings.

For about two hours on July 30, opening a finished mock board or diagnostic review showed an error screen instead of your answers. Nothing was lost — every answer and score was safe the whole time, and the reviews opened normally again once it was fixed.

A student asked why there was no Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis topic, and there genuinely was not one — no topic, no questions, no flashcards, while Myasthenia Gravis had 100 items and Guillain-Barré 95. The boards test the three against each other on how the weakness starts, which direction it spreads, whether sensation is involved, and whether it reverses. ALS is now its own topic under NP4 with 56 questions covering exactly that, plus breathing and swallowing care through to end-of-life.

The References list under a rationale now shows only textbooks, Philippine laws, and official guidelines. Review and Q&A books still sit behind the scenes as part of how we check our work, but they are not what you should be reading to go deeper, so they no longer appear in the list.

The new Hematologic Disorders topic had no references under its rationales. It does now.

By student request, the study timer can now count up as well as down. Flip it to Stopwatch mode and it times an open-ended study session for as long as you keep going — pause and pick it back up whenever you like, and it keeps counting while you move between pages.

The timer also keeps track of your study hours now, for accountability: finished focus sprints and stopwatch sessions add up in a Today and past-7-days view inside the timer panel, with a small bar for each day. Break time never counts, and the log stays on your device.

Hematology now has its own Med-Surg topic. Look for Hematologic Disorders under NP3 in Practice: 100 new questions covering iron deficiency, B12 and pernicious anemia, anemia of chronic kidney disease, aplastic anemia, sickle cell, thalassemia, G6PD, immune thrombocytopenia, hemophilia, DIC, and blood transfusion and its reactions. Until now this content was spread across Laboratory Values, Chronic Kidney Disease, and Oncology, with no single place to drill it.

The new topic has been added to every active study plan, so it turns up on your calendar alongside the rest of NP3. You do not need to rebuild your plan to get it.

By popular request: a small timer now sits at the bottom right of every study page. It runs the classic pomodoro rhythm — a focused sprint, then a short break, with a longer break after every fourth sprint — and it keeps counting while you move between pages, so you can practice, review flashcards, or read a cram sheet inside one sprint.

Every length is yours to change: the sprint, both breaks, and how many sprints come before the long break. You can also have the next sprint start by itself, and a soft chime tells you when one ends — both optional. Your settings stay on this device.

The timer knows when to stay out of the way: it never appears inside a mock board or the diagnostic, so nothing can chime in the middle of a timed exam.

The topics we have been rebuilding are genuinely harder than they were, and now we can say by how much. On the community health topics rebuilt so far, first-attempt accuracy sits around 60% where the older versions of those same items sat around 73%. That is the rebuild working as intended: the wrong options are now plausible enough that you have to reason rather than spot the odd one out, which is how the real board paper behaves. If your accuracy on a rebuilt topic looks lower than you remember, this is why, and it is not a step backwards.

We also checked what that does to your readiness tiers, because a harder bank could have quietly made everyone look less ready than they are. It does not: the tiers were already set against roughly this level of accuracy, so they have been left exactly as they were. Your readiness number still means what it meant last week.

Your highlights and pen marks can no longer be overwritten by an old BoardPal tab left open on another device or from days ago. If two copies of a sheet disagree, BoardPal now keeps the marks from both instead of letting the older one win silently.

Pen and highlighter strokes now draw as smooth curves while your hand is still moving, and on iPad the ink follows the pen tip more closely. Before this, the line looked blocky mid-stroke and only smoothed out after you lifted the pen.

Scrolling a sheet with two fingers, or with one finger while the pen tools are set to stylus-only, now glides to a stop the way other PDF readers do instead of halting the moment you lift your fingers.

Pinch-zooming no longer makes the page crawl up or down while you zoom. The spot between your fingers stays exactly where it is, at any zoom level and anywhere in the sheet.

Studying past midnight no longer splits your work across two days. If you start at 11:30 pm and keep going until 1:00 am, that is one study session and it counts as one day — before this, the questions on either side of midnight were counted separately, so a full session could fail the daily minimum on both halves and reset your streak.

A mock board section you start in the evening and finish after midnight now credits the evening you sat it, not only the day you submitted.

Reading a cram sheet now counts toward your streak and shows on your progress calendar. Any real study day keeps your streak alive — questions, flashcards, a mock, a diagnostic, or a cram sheet.

Streaks that were broken by any of the above have been recalculated from your actual study history, so your current streak now reflects the days you really studied.

A few days after your exam date, BoardPal sends a "the boards are behind you" message. The trouble is that the exam date on your study plan is a planning date: if you did not know your sitting yet, the date picker filled in a placeholder about three months out. Anyone still carrying a placeholder would have been congratulated for an exam they never sat. We found ten accounts in that position, caught it before the first one was due to go out in August, and the message now only sends when the date lines up with a PNLE that actually took place. Nobody received it.

Thank you to the fourth-year student who spotted this. She had started reviewing a year early and accepted the prefilled date even though her real sitting is in 2027, which is exactly the case that surfaced it. If your exam date is still a placeholder, it costs nothing to leave it, but setting the real one makes your plan and your countdown accurate.

The topic list has filter chips across the top — All topics, Needs work, Not started, and Flagged — each with a live count, and Needs work and Flagged sort your weakest first. The page used to show you the whole syllabus and leave the choosing to you.

Every topic you have missed something in now carries a "Redo" shortcut that starts a set of just those misses. Tapping the topic itself still serves questions you have not seen yet.

The sections no longer force Foundations & Fundamentals open every time you arrive, pushing the other five below the fold. They start closed and remember what you opened, and each section header carries its own progress bar and counts, so a closed page is still a map of where you are weak.

There is a search box on the Practice page now, so you can type "diabetes" or "triage" and go straight there instead of guessing which of the six sections owns it.

If you have already worked through most of a topic, your practice set now says so up front — for example "Only 19 new questions left in this topic" — instead of quietly handing you a shorter set than you asked for. When every question in a topic has been answered at least once, the set tells you it is review rather than new material.

A study plan task now completes when you have answered every new question the topic can still give you. Before this, a task that asked for 30 questions in a topic with only 19 left stayed unfinished no matter how much you studied.

Finishing a practice set you had picked up again no longer credits your plan task for questions you answered on an earlier day.

Starting a fresh study plan after you have already taken all five mock boards now schedules the mock boards again. Before this, a second run through the Table of Specifications came out with no mock boards in it at all.

Your Study Plan now tells you when its window has ended instead of leaving the countdown on "Exam week!", and it points you at starting a fresh round. Rebalance is no longer offered once your exam date has passed, because at that point it could only move every remaining topic onto a single day.

To spell it out, since it came up: nothing in BoardPal closes on your exam date. Practice questions, flashcards, your Vault, and mock board retakes all stay open, and a new plan covers every topic in the Table of Specifications again while your finished work stays in your history.

Once you have ticked off everything in your study plan, the button at the bottom of the page reads "Start another round" instead of "Reset schedule", and it explains what a new round does rather than warning you about what you lose. Finishing a full pass is not a reset.

Sticky notes on cram sheets now save automatically while you type, the same way pen and highlighter marks do. Closing the note, pressing back, or losing the page mid-note no longer discards your text.

Fixed a rare case where a mark made while an earlier save was still in progress would not reach your account until your next change on that page.

Reviews of mock board sections you finished before this week's mock board updates show your original answers, rationales, and score again.

If a mock board is updated while your section is still open, submitting now asks you to restart on the new questions instead of recording a wrong zero score.

Downloading a cram sheet as a PDF works again after a long reading session.

The choice you tap is now clearly marked: it fills with a deeper shade, its outline thickens, and its letter turns into a solid badge. You can confirm your answer at a glance before moving on, even on a small screen or in bright light. This works the same way everywhere you answer questions — practice, mock boards, the diagnostic, and the warm-up.

The marking never relies on color alone, so it stays readable if you have any difficulty telling colors apart, and it now reads clearly in both Light and Dark mode.

After you answer in tutor mode, the choices you did not pick are easier to read, so you can still study why each one was wrong while the correct answer stands out.

In tutor mode, the numbered boxes at the bottom of a practice set now show how you did: green for the ones you got right, red with an X for the ones you missed. You can spot every miss at a glance and tap straight back to it. In exam mode the boxes still only show which questions you have answered, since right and wrong are revealed in the Answer review after you submit.

Careful handwriting on cram sheets no longer breaks apart: pausing mid-word no longer turns your ink into a straight line (the shape snap now previews and steps aside the moment you keep writing), and a resting palm or an interrupted stroke keeps what you wrote instead of erasing it.

Long notes and heavily marked pages draw and save much more smoothly, especially on iPad — no more lag or lost marks on sheets with lots of ink.

The pen now follows your hand more faithfully: sharp corners stay sharp (a "w" no longer rounds into a "u"), small loops keep their shape, and the fountain pen writes like a real calligraphy nib — full downstrokes, fine upstrokes.

Every cram sheet now has a PDF download button in the reader. Your copy is personalized — your name appears on every page — so you can study offline or print it.

Daily flashcards and "Review your mistakes" tasks from past days no longer turn red as overdue — they now show quietly as passed, because nothing was lost: your cards are still due next session and your mistakes stay in the Vault until you clear them. Only topic work you can actually move counts as overdue now, and Rebalance says exactly what it respreads.

The custom practice builder now has a search box — type any topic (like "diabetes" or "triage") to jump straight to it instead of scrolling through every section. The flashcards custom-session builder got the same search.

Your Study Plan now remembers when you finish each assignment — tap a completed task to see the date and time under its Done tag. Assignments finished before today won't show a time, since we only started recording it now.

The Study Plan header now explains how your plan is built: every topic comes from the official PNLE Table of Specifications, sequenced so foundations and your weakest areas come first.

The Early Bird promo code (10% off any plan) is now shown right on the checkout page with a one-tap apply, so you don't have to hunt for it on Telegram. It runs until August 31 or until the 500 codes are used up, whichever comes first.

BoardPal now writes to you from admin@nleboardpal.com, and replies to anything we send go there too. It replaces the personal Gmail address that had been standing in since the alpha. Help & Support inside the app is still the fastest way to reach us, and nothing about how you contact us has changed.

New Score Trend chart on Performance: your first-try accuracy week by week against the 75% pass line, so you can see the direction you're moving — not just today's number. Weeks with only a handful of answers show as faint dots and never bend the line.

Performance now shows Accuracy by Difficulty — how you score on easy, moderate, and hard questions. BoardPal runs harder than the board on purpose, so this tells you whether hard items are where your points slip.

The Vault landing card now shows where your pile is heaviest — the topics with the most questions to redo, each with a one-tap link to drill that topic fresh.

Handwriting with the pen or highlighter on cram sheets is now much smoother — small letters keep their shape on phones, tablets, and desktop, at any zoom level.

Pausing briefly while writing a letter no longer turns your stroke into a straight line or an oval — snapping to a shape now needs a deliberate, clearly-still hold on a larger stroke.

The “Saving / Saved” indicator moved out of the annotation toolbar into a small floating pill below it, so the tools no longer shift around while you write.

New Topic Mastery page (Performance → Topic Mastery): your first-attempt accuracy on every topic in the PNLE table of specifications, grouped by subject with a 🔴/🟡/🟢 badge, a search box, and a one-tap drill for any topic — including the ones you haven't touched yet.

Mock results now include "Topics to review" — your missed items grouped by topic, most misses first, each with a drill link. It appears on the full board results and on each section's "View answers" review.

Topic Mastery also breaks down why you miss, per subject — whether a subject's misses are knowledge gaps, misread stems, slips, or time pressure — based on the miss reasons you tag on the rationale screen.

Writing on a cram sheet with an Apple Pencil or stylus no longer cuts off mid-stroke when your palm rests on the screen — you can write the way you would on paper.

You can now scroll a cram sheet with two fingers while a pen, highlighter, or eraser is armed — no need to put the tool away to move down the page.

Sticky notes on cram sheets are easier to use: the editor stays above the on-screen keyboard while you type, and scrolling with the note tool armed no longer drops accidental pins.

Full access is now available to everyone on three plans — ₱299 for 1 month, ₱499 for 2 months, or ₱999 for 10 months. Pick the one that matches the time you have left before your boards.

Payment is now instant. Choose a plan, scan the QR Ph code with GCash, Maya, or your bank's app, and your access switches on by itself — no receipt to upload, no waiting for verification.

Beta access is closed now that all 500 seats are taken. If you're already a member, nothing changes — your access, history, and streak carry on exactly as they are.

Topnotcher Track and Topnotcher Trajectory now require a 90% average — the badge should mean you're pacing with actual topnotchers, not just passing comfortably. If your tier changed today, your scores didn't — only the bar moved.

A new Passing Pace tier recognizes when you're clear of the 75% pass mark and building the margin that makes exam day calm.

Search inside a sheet: tap the magnifying glass (or press F) and type — every page that mentions your word shows up with a preview, one tap away.

Draw a line, circle, or box and hold still for a moment — it snaps to the perfect shape, and keeps adjusting while you drag. There's also a ruler mode that makes every stroke straight.

Bookmark pages you'll come back to — the ribbon icon stars the page, and your bookmarks live at the top of the page list on every device.

Pick a fine, medium, or bold size for the pen and highlighter, and if you write with a stylus, it now senses pressure — press lighter for a finer line. Stylus-only mode lets your pen draw while fingers scroll.

Night reading mode softens the page to a warm, dimmer tone for late-night sessions — tap the moon in the tools row.

Pages are dramatically sharper — text and diagram labels stay crisp even fully zoomed in, on every sheet.

Zooming is smooth now: buttons and double-tap glide instead of jumping, and pinch/zoom stays centered on the exact spot under your fingers.

Ink looks hand-drawn now — strokes render smoothly instead of jagged, and the pen comes in three styles: ballpoint, fountain (calligraphy nib), and brush — plus six pen colors and five highlighter colors.

Little comforts: a "Back to page X" pill after any jump, your marked pages listed automatically in the page panel, hover a sticky note to peek at it, a two-page side-by-side view on bigger screens, and the toolbar tucks away while you read.

Redo joins undo (Ctrl+Shift+Z), and a clear-page button wipes a page's marks in one tap — undoable, of course.

Spotted a mistake on a sheet? The flag button in the tools row reports that exact page to the content team — you'll get a note back when it's fixed, same as question reports.

Keyboard shortcuts on desktop: P pen, H highlighter, N sticky note, E eraser, F search, B bookmark, Ctrl+Z undo. Tap the keyboard icon in the tools row for the full list.

The Resources library got a redesign — cram sheets now show cover previews, and you can search by title or topic and filter by NP to find the right sheet fast.

Continue reading: BoardPal now remembers the page you were on in every sheet, on every device — one tap takes you right back.

My Notes: every sticky note you leave on a cram sheet is gathered in one place under Resources — tap any note to jump straight back to its page.

The Resources page is easier to get around — My Notes and the two starter guides now sit right at the top, above the cram-sheet library, and My Notes also lives in the Study menu for one-tap access from anywhere.

Cram sheets now open in a built-in reader — pinch to zoom, jump between pages, and mark them up with a pen, highlighter, and sticky notes. Everything you annotate saves to your account, so it's waiting for you on every device, every time you come back.

Building or rebuilding your study plan no longer re-schedules a mock board you've already completed. Your next unfinished mock (for example, Mock Board 2) now takes the early benchmark slot instead, and if you've done only Day 1 of a mock, the new plan schedules just the missing Day 2.

Tapping a highlight (or pen mark) on an answer choice now removes it in one tap, the same as in the question — no need to drag across it again. A tap on unmarked text still picks your answer.

Finishing a practice session, mock board, diagnostic, or flashcard review now ends with a quick confetti moment — a bigger one when you clear the 75% passing bar, and a tiny pop each time you tick off a study plan task. Prefer things quiet? Turn it off any time in Profile → Appearance → Celebrations.

Building a study plan now asks how much time you can give per day — 1.5, 2, 3, or 4 hours, or “Best for me” and BoardPal picks a comfortable pace from your timeline. Every study day is sized to fit your choice: less time means fewer questions per topic, never fewer topics.

Already have a plan? Tap “Daily time · Change” at the top of your Study Plan to lighten (or deepen) your remaining days. Everything you’ve finished carries over, and your old plan stays restorable.

Plans of about a month and a half or less now schedule lighter topic sessions, so a tight timeline stays doable instead of demanding marathon days.