Problem. Med Prep is a Swiss prep school in Geneva and Lausanne that gets medical students through a brutal first year. Their teaching was excellent and their delivery was manual: the question banks, mock exams and scoring all needed to become software that thousands of students could hit at once, hardest right before exams.
Approach. A Rails testing platform built for the load pattern rather than the average: large question banks organised by subject, timed exams under real conditions, detailed scoring, and subscriptions through Stripe. Performance work focused on the concurrency spike around exam season, because that’s the only moment when being slow actually costs the school anything.
Outcome. The platform carries the paid side of a school that has worked with over 13,000 students since 2009 (their figures, not mine). Practice, mock exams and scoring stopped being something staff assembled by hand.