Who builds
this question bank.

The person behind it

Nauti Test Pro is built and run by Juan Pablo Valenzuela Castro, an independent software developer based in Guasave, Sinaloa, Mexico. There is no company behind it and no editorial team: the same person writes the code, maintains the banks and answers the support email.

It started in 2023 as a study tool for the Mexican Merchant Marine promotion exams, and grew market by market as seafarers from other countries asked for their own syllabus. The international market — English STCW banks and the Marlins English test, for crews outside the five countries — opened in August 2026.

What the bank actually contains

There is no single figure, because what you can open depends on your market. These numbers come straight from the question manifest and are regenerated on every deployment, so they cannot drift from what is really in the app.

The Marlins English bank — 2,464 questions, 510 of them with their own audio recording — is included in every market.

How mistakes get fixed

Every question in the app has a report button. When a member flags one, the report lands in an admin queue with the question id, the member’s comment and the bank it came from — it is not a generic contact form that gets lost.

Each report is checked against the syllabus of that exam. If the question is wrong, the fix is applied to the source bank and ships on the next deployment, and the member who reported it gets a notification when it is resolved. If the question is right, it stays and the reason gets recorded. That loop is the reason the older banks are in better shape than they were.

This is worth being plain about: the questions are practice material, not the official exam. Passing here does not guarantee passing there, and no serious tool can promise that.

Where the questions come from

• Written hereThe Marlins maritime English bank, including its audio recordings and the explanation shown after each answer. Written to mirror the format and skills of the test, not its questions.
• Public exam sittingsQuestions published officially by an administration together with its answer key, reproduced citing the sitting and the year — as with the Spanish PER (Andalucía and GVA 2024–2026, DGMM 2020).
• Written to the official syllabusQuestions written here following the subjects and competences of an official syllabus, without reproducing the exam — as with the STCW banks and the ones aligned with the DIRECTEMAR series.

Nauti Test Pro is independent and has no affiliation with, or endorsement from, any maritime administration, school or examining body. Trademarks and exam names belong to their owners and are used only to identify the exam being prepared.

How the Marlins banks are written

The three Marlins banks — Seafarers (2,464 questions), Cruise Ship Staff (466) and Offshore Workers (874) — and the free TOSE speaking pack are written here, and the same method applies to all of them. It starts with a format specification taken from the free practice tests Marlins publishes and from its own description of each test: the screen types, the sections, the number of questions and the time. Only the format is taken. No item from any Marlins test is copied, reconstructed from memory or "adapted", and none of our items is a paraphrase of one.

The items are then written by narrow theme — bridge, engine room, guest services, drill floor, helideck, camp life — by writers and language-model agents working from that specification, each batch reviewed for the language and for the facts by language-model agents briefed as an English examiner and as a maritime or offshore specialist, with the owner's own checks on top. Where a fact varies from one company to another (a muster procedure, a lifting rule), the item is rewritten so it does not depend on it.

Every item is then solved blind, twice. Reviewers — again language-model agents, given the question but never the answer key — solve each question; any disagreement with the key, and any item two readers understand differently, is rewritten around the correct answer — the keyed option stays, the texts around it change, so the balance of answer letters in the unit does not drift — and the rewritten items are solved blind again. Listening items and dictations are recorded from a script with synthesised British voices, one voice per speaker, and carry a transcript. The explanation shown after each answer is written in English, Spanish and Portuguese, and the app fails its own build if a bank is missing any of the three.

Score targets are labelled by source and by date. The recommended minimums by rank for the Seafarers test are the only figures that are Marlins' own (its help-centre article of January 2022). The cruise-ship targets are what recruiters and crew sites reported when the bank was written (September 2026), and the Offshore Workers targets are Saudi Aramco's requirement as Marlins quotes it in the same help centre — an overall score and a minimum in every section. None of these is presented as a Marlins figure when it is not.

Items are original and stay that way: nothing recalled from a real sitting or passed on by a candidate is accepted, whoever sends it. If you find a wrong key, an ambiguous stem or a bad recording, report it from the question itself — how reports are handled is described above.

Contact

Support, corrections, press or anything else: hello@nautitestpro.com. Reported questions are better sent from inside the app, where the report carries the question id automatically.