Shorepass
Join the beta
Shorepass
Join the beta
Step 1 of 2
One app holds all five. Choose the one you are sitting first — you can switch inside the app. C1 is open free.
Step 2 of 2
The beta is on Google Play, by invitation. Give us the Gmail address your phone's Play Store uses: we add it to the beta by hand and email you the link to install, usually within a day. Nothing else is sent to it.
You are on the list
Watch your inbox for the Google Play link — usually within a day. Open it on your phone, tap Become a tester, then install Shorepass from Google Play.
Then work through C1. It is free, every mode, quiz bee included — not a sample.
Shorepass
MARINA licensure review · deck & engine
Quick review. Max retention.
Will you still know it on exam day? That is not about willpower, and not about how many hours you sit with the book. Six things decide it, and researchers have studied them for a hundred years.
Shorepass is built on those six. Every question is prepared for them. The app decides what you study and when. You feel it in one place: you need far fewer hours. That matters when the hours are your vacation.
A whole competency is free, forever — not a trial, not a sample. No account, no card. Work through it and decide afterwards.
Android phones and tablets. An iPhone version is coming. Register and we will tell you when it is ready.
Six findings from memory research, built into every question.
The app picks what you study next, so no evening is spent on what you already know.
Unlock once. Nothing you study ever waits on a connection.
Not a trial. Enrolment is one payment from ₱1,500 — nothing recurring.
The science
There is no shortcut here. Nothing makes the exam easy. What these do is save your time. Each one makes a fact last longer for every hour you study. Doing this by hand, question by question, would take months. That work is already done.
This is one real question, exactly as the app shows it. Four of the six are on this single card.
Retrieval practice
Every mode asks you for the answer before it shows you one. Pulling a fact out makes it stronger. Reading it again does far less. This is one of the most tested findings in learning research.
Discrimination training
Some questions look almost the same but have different answers. We find them across the whole bank and put them side by side. Then we name the difference. You cannot learn to tell two things apart if you meet them a week apart.
Cue and key
Every question has a cue. Those are the words that tell you what is really being asked. And a key, the part of the answer that settles it. Your memory needs a handle to grab. A whole line painted yellow gives it none.
Distinctiveness
These papers have quirks. A strange word. A misspelling in one question and nowhere else. Odd details keep two similar questions apart, so we mark them for you instead of pretending the questions look different when they do not.
Interleaving
Finish one competency, then start the next. It feels tidy. It works badly. Mixing them feels harder and works better. The exam is mixed too, and picking which rule applies is a skill you have to practise.
Fluency
Knowing it, and knowing it in four seconds, are not the same thing. A short timer trains speed. It also keeps slow and wrong apart, so you can see which one you are and watch your average drop week by week.
This is what principle 02 looks like when it is done to you instead of explained to you.
Nothing here makes the exam easier. It makes the same knowledge cost fewer hours.
The few words marked in every paragraph are the cue and the key — principle 03. Read only those and you still have the argument. Each card carries one odd detail, a numeral and a mark, so your memory can tell six similar things apart — principle 04. The two habits above sit side by side rather than pages apart — principle 02.
That is the whole idea, applied to a web page instead of eight thousand exam questions. In the app it is applied to every one of them.
What that buys you
Nobody ever taught a seafarer how to study. You were taught what to know. The cost of that lands on the few weeks a year you are home — and on what happens if the few weeks are not enough.
Failing is not a fee. It is a contract. You sign on again at the rank you already hold, wait for the next window, and come home to do this a second time. That is the real price of a review that did not stick, and it is why the method matters more than the material.
Vacation means family. Medical. Agency. Papers to renew. And somewhere in there, an exam to prepare for. Advice that assumes three free months is written for somebody else. The real question is what to do with the two hours you actually get.
On board you look things up. You ask the Master. The book is right there on the shelf. In the exam hall you have none of that. Being good at the job is not the same skill as remembering it cold.
Almost everyone does it, and it is one of the weakest ways to learn. Words you have read before feel familiar, and your mind reads familiar as known. You close the book sure of yourself. Then you cannot produce the answer, because you never once practised producing it.
You do not have to plan it
Most people open a reviewer at page one and work forward. That spends the same effort on what you already know as on what will fail you. The app decides instead, from how you have actually answered.
This is the first screen. Everything you need to choose is already on it.
Not twenty. Three, on the first screen, each with a button that starts working it. That is the whole decision, made for you, every time you open the app.
It is scored the way the real one is scored. Each competency against its own line. It can tell you that you passed overall and still failed C1.
Questions you got wrong return. Questions you know cold stop taking your evening. You do not manage a schedule. You just answer the next one you are given.
Five ways to study
No review centre gives you one activity for four months. Neither do we.
The main one. Topics mixed together, fully marked, with the look-alike of each question shown beside it.
One competency, worked until it holds. For the gap the mock exam just found.
A short timer on every card. Trains speed, and keeps slow apart from wrong.
The reading pass. Cue, key, the odd detail, the look-alikes. For material you are seeing for the first time.
Built like the real paper. Real number of items per topic, real pass marks, real clock.
How accurate and how fast you are, topic by topic, over time. Not a score. It shows which topic will fail you while you can still fix it.
What we have seen so far
Not months. About a month, studying around a family and a medical and an agency. That is what the method is for: not to teach you more, but to make the same knowledge stick in fewer hours.
It is a small group. Shorepass is new. We will keep saying that until the number is big enough to mean something. A review centre that quotes a pass rate it cannot show you is one you should doubt. What we can show you is the method above, and the first competency free inside the app.
The mock exam
Because the real one can. Our papers follow MARINA's own exam permit: how many items each topic gets, and the mark each one must reach on its own. So it can tell you that you scored 85 overall and still failed C1. A printed reviewer can never tell you that.
That result is the most useful thing here. It turns four months of general worry into one sentence: this topic, this week.
Built for a seafarer at sea
Most study apps check your subscription every month. That is fine on land and useless at sea. Sign on for three months and the app you paid for locks you out in week five, a thousand miles from a tower.
Every question, every mark, every score is on the phone. Nothing you do while studying asks the network for anything, so a dead SIM mid-ocean changes nothing at all.
The app does check in when it happens to have a connection — only to notice that a corrected question bank has been published, and to see a licence that has been withdrawn. It sends your device code and nothing else. If it never gets a connection, it never stops working.
Paste one line and it runs until your licence ends. Airplane mode, mid-ocean, a dead SIM. None of it matters.
Your answers, marks, notes and drawings stay on your phone. We never see them: they are never sent anywhere.
Get the app
Google Play only, by invitation. No account and no card. The first competency of every exam is simply open.
One app, all five reviewers: Deck Management, Deck Operational, the GOC, Engine Management and Engine Operational. Phones and tablets on Android 8 or newer.
Leave your Google Play email; we add you by hand and send the install link.
We are building it. Apple's review takes longer than Android's, and we would rather ship it right than early.
We will write once, when it is out. Your address is used for nothing else, and there is no list to unsubscribe from.
Enrolment
₱500 a month is about ₱17 a day — and unlike a review centre it asks you to be in no particular room, in no particular city, on no particular evening. It works at sea. Pick the length that matches your time before the exam; the longer you take, the cheaper each month gets.
Bought here, nothing renews by itself, and nothing fails to renew while you are away. Prefer to pay in the app? Google Play has a monthly subscription, ₱499 a month, cancel any time.
Best seller · ₱417 a month
Any length from three to twelve months is on the next page, on the same falling scale.
Why a year is the one to take, if you can. Spacing is one of the six. Memory is built over months, not in the fortnight before the exam — and a year is the only term that covers a whole contract at sea and a re-take without you arranging anything from the middle of the Pacific.
Before you pay
C1 is open in every install. The whole topic, fully marked. Work through it and decide whether this way of studying suits you. We would rather you judged the real thing than a screenshot.
Tap Unlock everything. It shows an eight-character device code. That code names your phone and nothing else. No serial number, no account, no personal details.
Type in that code and pay by QR Ph — the national QR standard. Scan one code with GCash, Maya, GrabPay, BPI, BDO or whichever banking app is already on your phone. PayMongo handles it; your details never reach us.
You get one line of text, and a copy by email. Paste it into the app and it opens. That is the last time either of us needs a connection.