VivaBuddy: An AI Examiner That Quizzes You on Your Own Notes (Built for My Friends)

Description and use

VivaBuddy is a practice examiner that reads a PDF of study notes or a resume, generates five questions from that material, follows up adaptively, scores answers, and provides a final feedback report.

Problem

Friends needed a practice examiner that reads their own study notes or resumes and asks specific, follow‑up questions like a real viva examiner.

Outcome

Friends reported that questions were directly drawn from their uploaded PDFs, providing realistic practice for vivas and interviews.

Workflow

• Upload a text‑based PDF and select subject and difficulty
• Generate five questions grounded in the PDF
• Answer each question
• Receive adaptive follow‑up questions based on answers
• Receive a final report with scores, strengths, and revision suggestions

Evidence

VivaBuddy is a practice examiner for university vivas. You upload a study PDF, pick a subject and difficulty, and an AI examiner asks you five questions drawn from your own material.

Source

During development, I used Qwen2.5-Coder 7B through local Ollama. It gave me a local model for coding and debugging, so I could iterate without sending development prompts to a hosted service.

Source

For the deployed practice sessions, I chose Gemma 4 31B because its general reasoning focus is a better fit for generating questions from a student's notes or resume.

Source

It reads text-based PDFs only (no scanned images), handles one PDF per session, and the scores come from the model's judgment, so treat them as practice feedback, not a grade.

Source