What Palier is, and what it is not

Palier is an independent study tool, built in the open. It is not the exam, and using it is not a substitute for the Public Service Commission's own preparation material.

It contains no real test questions. Every item is written or generated for practice, and no result it produces is official.

What it is

A source-available place to practise the Second Language Evaluation’s reading, written expression and oral tests, aiming at level B or C. Practising is free: drills and mock exams need no account and work offline. The AI features (writing feedback, generated practice sets and spoken practice) cost a few cents each, billed by OpenAI to you, with no subscription to us. They run on your own OpenAI key, straight from your browser, and each one shows its cost before it spends.

What it is not

Not a language course. It assumes you already work in French and helps you perform under exam conditions.
Not a predictor. It gives an estimate with its uncertainty shown, never a promised result.
Not affiliated with the Public Service Commission of Canada, the Canada School of Public Service, or any department.

Where the questions come from

The items are written by an AI model, Claude, as original passages and questions in the register of the federal workplace. Nothing is copied from a real exam or a real document. No person reads every item before it is published. Each one is reviewed blind by separate instances of the same model, which must find the intended answer and no second one, and then passes a set of automatic checks. An item that fails is discarded, not repaired. Items written by people are welcome, and they pass the same checks.

So the bank tells you where each item came from. Any item’s provenance is one tap away. Reporting an item takes one tap and opens a public issue, and items that turn out badly are retired. Your estimate says what it rests on, and is never quietly adjusted.

Who makes it

Palier is a personal, non-governmental project, built in the open by Doug Keefe and anyone who contributes. It holds no government information and accepts none.

Licence

The code is under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0 and the content under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0. You may copy it, change it, and run your own version for any non-commercial purpose. Commercial use is not permitted.