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Item Review Desk is a workflow app for exam questions: an item must pass the project’s writing checks and receive approval from a human other than its author before it appears in the learner-facing practice bank. Its creator, Ayodeji, describes how the app tracks review decisions, supports an exam blueprint, and handles publishing in a project write-up published October 1, 2026. The account is a first-person description, not an independent product review or proof that the checks guarantee valid assessment questions.
How Item Review Desk controls exam-question approval
Ayodeji describes each exam question as an item with a workflow state and a transition log. The log records who changed the state, the previous and new states, when the change happened, and why. That gives reviewers a record of the decision trail rather than just a current status.
The workflow states are draft, in review, changes requested, approved, and retired. An item in review can be sent back for changes or approved, while an approved item can be retired or reopened. The account says retirement and reopening require a note.
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The central separation of duties is that an item’s author cannot approve their own work, and only a human can approve. Ayodeji states: “Only a person can approve, and the person who wrote an item cannot approve it.” Read Ayodeji’s project write-up on DEV Community.
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The project also allows an AI agent to draft and submit items for review, but Ayodeji says the agent has no code path to approve them. Submission and approval are blocked if the item-writing checks report errors. This creates a human decision point, rather than treating an automated draft or a clean lint result as sufficient authorization to publish.
What the item-writing checks look for
The checks described in the project focus on common item construction requirements. They look for one clear problem in the stem, capitalization of negative terms such as NOT and EXCEPT, three to five answer options, exactly one keyed answer, a rationale, and a linked learning objective. They also flag “all of the above.”
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Some checks produce warnings rather than errors. The form warns if the keyed answer is substantially longer than the distractors or if only the correct answer repeats words from the stem. In Ayodeji’s account, seven of eleven finished sample items triggered the answer-length warning. He says he rewrote approved items in response, while two items submitted for review retained the warning. Those counts describe his sample content, not a general measure of how often exam questions have this issue.
A check can enforce a format rule, but it cannot establish that a question accurately measures its intended learning objective, is fair to the intended candidates, or performs reliably. The project write-up does not provide independent evidence for validity, reliability, accessibility, security, or performance at scale. Reviewers still need subject-matter judgment and appropriate assessment-quality review.
How approved items connect to a practice bank and blueprint
The practice bank is described as displaying approved items only. That separation means draft, in-review, and changes-requested questions do not appear in the learner-facing bank unless they move through the approval process.
A separate board compares exam-blueprint targets with current item coverage. The sample is a Contact Centre Associate, Level 1 assessment linked to learning objectives. Ayodeji describes four learning objectives and twelve items represented across approved, in-review, changes-requested, and draft states; he does not provide a verified count for each state. The board’s purpose is to make coverage visible, not to substitute for deciding whether individual questions are sound.
What the project’s implementation and publishing story show
Ayodeji says the app uses Next.js 16 and Sanity 6, with Sanity Studio embedded in the Next.js site. He describes an offline mode that runs the project’s GROQ queries against seed data with groq-js, so a local preview can run without a Sanity account. He also describes a one-click GitHub Action that imports seed data through the HTTP API. These are implementation details reported by the builder.
The write-up recounts a publishing defect in which an action patched a draft and tried to publish it immediately, but Studio treated the item as having nothing to publish. The question remained an unpublished draft, and the practice bank still showed eight questions instead of nine. Ayodeji says he fixed the behavior by writing the transition directly to the published document in one transaction and removing the draft. After retrying, he observed the approved item appear on the practice site with its transition logged. This is the creator’s account of a fix and retest, not an independently reproduced result.
He also describes changing a lint rule that initially flagged lowercase “not” anywhere in a stem. The rule was narrowed to the sentence asking the question, since “not” elsewhere could be ordinary scenario language. Ayodeji says the adjusted behavior has a test for both cases, illustrating why checks need to distinguish a genuine item-writing issue from harmless wording.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What to evaluate in an item-review workflow
Item Review Desk is one project, not a product comparison. For teams considering a similar workflow, the project’s design suggests useful evaluation questions:
- Can an author approve their own item, or is approval assigned to someone else?
- Does the system log each state change with the person, time, reason, and prior state?
- Do item-writing errors block submission or release, and are warnings distinguishable from blocking errors?
- Does the learner-facing bank exclude items that have not been approved?
- Can reviewers compare current item coverage with blueprint targets and learning objectives?
- Are requesting changes, retirement, and reopening recorded with a reason?
- Has publishing been checked end to end, so an approved state and the learner-facing item stay in sync?
These criteria help assess whether a workflow supports accountable review; they do not establish that any particular app will produce valid or fair exams. For the underlying project description, see Ayodeji’s October 1, 2026 DEV Community article.
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