What's new in July 2026

Jul 22 to 31 · 21 updates

1. 30Jul · Thu

   Add mock boards to your study plan

   NewImproved

   • New
     Add unscheduled mock board sittings to any plan day. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • Improved
     Early mock sittings now tick their calendar task right away. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   Three fixes you reported

   FixedNew

   • Fixed
     Tapping a Vault topic now redoes your misses instead of serving new questions. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • Fixed
     The streak tile now shows how many questions the day still needs. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • New
     Optionally show each choice's explanation inside the choice itself. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • Fixed
     A two-hour outage on mock and diagnostic reviews was fixed. No answers were lost. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   ALS joins the neuro topics

   New

   • New
     ALS is now its own NP4 topic with 56 questions. more ▾less ▴

     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.

2. 29Jul · Wed

   Cleaner references under each rationale

   ImprovedFixed

   • Improved
     References now list textbooks, laws, and guidelines only. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • Fixed
     The Hematology topic's rationales now carry their references. more ▾less ▴

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

3. 28Jul · Tue

   Stopwatch mode and study hours in the timer

   New

   • New
     The study timer now has a count-up stopwatch mode. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • New
     The timer tallies your study hours across the week. more ▾less ▴

     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.

4. 27Jul · Mon

   Hematology gets its own topic

   NewImproved

   • New
     Hematology now has its own topic under NP3. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • Improved
     The new topic was added to existing study plans. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   A pomodoro timer for study sprints

   NewImproved

   • New
     A pomodoro timer now lives on every study page. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • New
     Sprint and break lengths are fully customizable. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • Improved
     The timer hides itself during mock boards and the diagnostic. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   Why rebuilt topics feel harder, and what it means

   Improved

   • Improved
     Rebuilt topics now run about 60% first-attempt accuracy, down from about 73%, by design. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • Improved
     Readiness tiers were checked against the harder bank and left unchanged. more ▾less ▴

     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.

5. 26Jul · Sun

   A smoother, safer cram-sheet reader

   FixedImproved

   • Fixed
     Old open tabs can no longer overwrite your newer marks. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • Improved
     Ink is smooth while you draw, not just after you lift the pen. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • Improved
     Scrolling now glides to a stop instead of halting instantly. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • Fixed
     Pinch zoom holds the page steady under your fingers. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   Your streak now understands late-night studying

   FixedImproved

   • Fixed
     A session that runs past midnight now counts as one day, not two halves. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • Fixed
     Mock sections worked past midnight now credit the night you sat them. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • Improved
     Reading a cram sheet now counts as a study day. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • Fixed
     Past streaks broken by these gaps have been restored. more ▾less ▴

     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.

6. 25Jul · Sat

   A congratulations email that would have gone to the wrong people

   FixedImproved

   • Fixed
     A placeholder exam date could have triggered a congratulations email. Fixed before any sent. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • Improved
     A student reviewing a year early surfaced it. Setting your real exam date keeps your plan accurate. more ▾less ▴

     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 Practice page now answers "what should I drill next?"

   NewImproved

   • New
     Filter the topic list by Needs work, Not started, or Flagged. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • New
     Redo a single topic's misses in one tap. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • Improved
     Practice sections start closed and remember what you opened. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • New
     Search the Practice page by topic name. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   When a topic runs out of new questions

   ImprovedFixed

   • Improved
     Practice sets now say when a topic is running low on new questions. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • Fixed
     Plan tasks no longer get stuck asking for questions that do not exist. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • Fixed
     Plan progress now counts only the questions you answered in that sitting. more ▾less ▴

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

   Studying past your exam date, and second rounds

   FixedImproved

   • Fixed
     A second study plan now schedules the mock boards again. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • Fixed
     Study plans now handle a passed exam date honestly. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • Improved
     Nothing in BoardPal closes on your exam date. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • Improved
     Finished your plan? The reset button now offers you a new round. more ▾less ▴

     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.

7. 24Jul · Fri

   Sticky notes save as you type

   Fixed

   • Fixed
     Sticky notes now save automatically while you type. more ▾less ▴

     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 mark made mid-save now always reaches your account. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   Mock board reviews and PDF downloads fixed

   Fixed

   • Fixed
     Older mock section reviews show your answers and score again. more ▾less ▴

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

   • Fixed
     A mock updated mid-section asks you to restart instead of scoring zero. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • Fixed
     Cram sheet PDF downloads work again after a long reading session. more ▾less ▴

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

8. 23Jul · Thu

   You can see which answer you picked

   ImprovedFixed

   • Improved
     The answer you pick is now clearly marked. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • Improved
     Your pick is readable in any theme, color vision aside. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • Fixed
     The choices you didn't pick are easier to read after answering. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • Improved
     Practice question boxes now show green for correct, red for missed. more ▾less ▴

     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.

9. 22Jul · Wed

   Smoother writing in the cram-sheet reader, plus PDF downloads

   FixedImprovedNew

   • Fixed
     Handwriting on cram sheets no longer breaks apart. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • Improved
     Faster, smoother ink on heavily annotated sheets. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • Improved
     Pen ink follows your handwriting more faithfully. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • New
     Download any cram sheet as a personalized PDF. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   Passed flashcard days no longer pile up as overdue

   Fixed

   • Fixed
     Passed flashcard days no longer read as overdue. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   Topic search and finish times, from your suggestions

   NewImproved

   • New
     Search topics by name when building a custom set. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • New
     Completed plan tasks now show when you finished them. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   • Improved
     The Study Plan now explains how it's built. more ▾less ▴

     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.

   Early Bird code now shown at checkout

   Improved

   • Improved
     The 10% Early Bird code is now shown at checkout. more ▾less ▴

     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.