Review Mistakes Kept Restarting. A Learner Caught It.

If you used Review Mistakes Only on a SecuSpark practice exam since mid-August, you probably hit this: your first answer went through, your second sent you back to question 1, and from there you went in circles. That was my bug. It is fixed as of September 24, and a Security+ learner is the reason it got found.

The report

This week a Security+ learner sent this through the in-app feedback form:

It’s glitchy on the practice test retakes. I can submit the first answer but submitting the second answer restarts the practice exam.

It named the mode and the exact step that broke. Those two sentences were enough to find it.

What the bug did

Review Mistakes Only replays the questions you got wrong. The loop went like this:

1. You answered question 1. Nothing looked off: you were already on question 1, and after the one-second answer reveal the exam moved you to question 2.
2. You answered question 2. The exam jumped back to question 1 and dropped the pending move forward.
3. From then on it looped, question 1, question 2, question 1, question 2, for as long as you kept going.

Full practice exams were never affected; only the mistakes review looped.

Why it hid for a year, then showed up in August

The line that starts a mistakes review at question 1 dates back to June 2025. It was meant to run once, when the review opens. Instead it ran every time you submitted an answer, because each answer updates the list of questions you have answered, and that list was one of the things it watched. Full exams have a guard that lets their “resume where you left off” jump happen once per session. The mistakes check sat just above that guard, so it never got the protection.

For more than a year nobody saw it, because a second bug covered for the first. The one-second timer that carries you to the next question could not be cancelled, and it remembered which question you had just answered. So when the review yanked you back to question 1, the old timer fired anyway and moved you forward again. At worst, question 1 flashed on screen for a moment.

In mid-August I fixed that timer. It could fire after you had already pressed Next or Previous and drag you somewhere you didn’t mean to go, so I made it cancellable: if the question on screen changes, the pending move is dropped. That was the right fix for that problem. It also removed the only thing hiding this one. From then on, the jump back to question 1 cancelled the timer, and the loop was all you saw.

How I confirmed it

Before changing anything, I checked whether one learner had been unlucky or whether everyone was stuck. Among learners who allow analytics, every mistakes review since mid-August showed the same fingerprint: the same two questions answered over and over, A, B, A, B. It showed up in Security+, A+, CySA+, Network+, SecAI+ and Claude Certified Architect (CCA-F) reviews. Before the timer change, the same mode covered 10 to 18 different questions per session. For about six weeks, anyone who opened Review Mistakes with more than one missed question hit the loop.

The fix

The mistakes review now jumps to question 1 once, when you enter the mode, and then leaves you alone. Leave the mode and come back, and it starts from the top again. Full exams still resume at your first unanswered question, exactly as before.

I wrote the tests before the fix. There are seven. Three walk through a mistakes review the way you would, answering and waiting out the reveal, and all three failed against the old code. The other four pin down full-exam behavior so this change can’t quietly break the other mode. All seven pass now, and the fix went live on September 24.

You don’t need to do anything. If you gave up on Review Mistakes because it kept looping, it works now. Every answer you submitted during the loop was saved, so the two questions you kept seeing may count a few extra attempts in your history.

The learner who caught it

I’m not naming them, but they said yes when I asked to show you their character. This is their slime, drawn by the same code that draws it in the game: a Security Analyst at evolution stage 2, wearing a Thinking Cap and carrying a USB Sword.

The USB Sword’s flavor text reads “It only goes in on the third try.” For six weeks that was also a fair description of Review Mistakes, so it feels right that the one carrying the sword is the one who told me.

They got 3 days of premium for sending feedback, which every account can earn once. I added three more days on top as a thank-you for finding something real.

Send me what you find

I build SecuSpark mostly on my own, and I can’t walk every path the way you use it. Reports like this one are how I find the bugs that only surface after weeks of real use. The feedback button in the app comes straight to me, and I read every submission. If you haven’t used it yet, detailed feedback earns 3 days of premium once per account, whether the news is good or bad.