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Study guide generator

The night before an exam, forty pages of notes is not a study resource. It's a source of panic.

What you want at that point is one page. The terms you have to know, the ideas they sit inside, the mistakes people make, and a few questions to check yourself with. Everything else is noise you don't have time for.

Making that page yourself is genuinely good studying. It's also two hours you may not have at 9pm.

What this does

Upload your notes or slides and you get a one-page study sheet built from them.

It comes out in a fixed order, because the order is part of what makes a study sheet useful:

  1. Key terms, with short definitions
  2. Core concepts, explained properly rather than listed
  3. Formulas and steps, when the material has any
  4. Common mistakes, the things people get wrong on this topic
  5. Test yourself, a handful of questions
  6. Answers, last, so you can cover them

You pick how long it should be. Concise is a single tight page for a final review. Standard is the normal choice. In-depth is closer to proper revision notes and works better a week out than the night before.

You can also type what to focus on. "Just the second half of the lecture" or "the parts about market failure" will weight it that way.

You can edit it

The sheet opens in an editor, not a locked preview. Fix a definition, delete a section that isn't examinable, add the thing your lecturer said would definitely come up.

This matters because the generated version is a starting point, not a finished artefact. You know things about your course that aren't in the file, like which topics your lecturer keeps circling back to. Putting those in yourself takes five minutes and makes the sheet twice as useful.

Edits save on their own as you type.

Getting it out

Export as Markdown, Word, or PDF. Or hit print.

Print is the one most people end up using, and there's a reason for it. A sheet you can hold and write on gets used differently to a tab you have open behind six other tabs. Annotating it by hand as you revise is itself a useful step.

One warning worth taking seriously

A study sheet is the most dangerous study tool there is, because it feels the most productive.

Reading a clean, well-organised page feels like learning. It reads smoothly, everything is in order, and you come away confident. That confidence often isn't earned. Smooth reading gets mistaken for knowing, and you find out which it was during the exam.

The research name for this is the fluency illusion, and study sheets trigger it harder than almost anything else.

So use it the right way round:

Wrong: read the sheet three times, feel ready.

Right: read it once, cover it, write down what you remember, then check. The gap between what you wrote and what's on the page is the actual information.

That's why "test yourself" is on the sheet and why the answers are at the bottom rather than beside the questions. The sheet is built to be covered up.

Where it struggles

Thin source material. A deck of twelve-word slides produces a sheet of twelve-word bullets. There's nothing else in the file to draw on.

Heavy maths. Formulas come through, and the steps section handles procedures fine. A long derivation still belongs on paper.

It can be wrong. It's generated from your notes, so it stays close to your course, but check anything that looks off before you memorise it. The editor is right there.

What it costs

An account, and five sheet generations on the free tier.

Editing a sheet you already have is free and unlimited, as is exporting it, printing it, and coming back to it later. Only generating a new one counts.

The other things in the same place

If you can't explain the topic out loud yet, start with the video. A study sheet is for compressing something you already understand, not for learning it the first time.

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