How to quiz yourself from your own notes
2 min read
Reading your notes again feels productive. The page looks familiar, so it feels like you know it. The problem is that recognising something is much easier than recalling it, and an exam asks you to recall.
Testing yourself is the fix. Pulling an answer out of your memory, often called active recall or retrieval practice, is one of the most consistently supported study techniques in learning research. This guide is about how to do it with the notes you already have.
Turn headings into questions
Go through a page of notes and rewrite each heading or main point as a question. "Causes of inflation" becomes "What are the main causes of inflation?" "Newton's second law" becomes "What does Newton's second law say, and what is the formula?"
Write the questions on a separate page or on cards, so you can look at them without seeing the answers.
Mix the kinds of question
Different questions test different things, and your assessments will use more than one kind.
- Multiple choice is quick and good for definitions and facts.
- Short answer makes you produce the idea yourself, in a sentence or two.
- Long answer makes you explain, compare or argue, which is what most written exams reward.
If your exam has extended responses, your practice should too. A student who only drills multiple choice tends to find out in the exam that they cannot explain the idea in full.
Answer before you look
Close the notes. Write or say your answer in full before you check it. Thinking "I know that one" and flipping to the answer does not count, because you have not actually retrieved anything.
Getting an answer wrong is fine. A wrong answer you then correct tends to stick better than one you read passively.
Mark yourself honestly
Compare your answer to your notes and give it one of three marks: right, partly right, or wrong. Partly right matters. If you named two of three causes, you need to know which one you dropped.
Keep a short list of what you got wrong. That list is your study plan for the next session.
Come back to it
One quiz is not enough. Do the same questions again a few days later, and again the week after. Spreading practice out over time works better than doing it all in one night, and the questions you keep missing show you where to spend your time.
Common mistakes
- Writing questions that are too easy, where the answer is one word you would never forget.
- Only testing the topics you like.
- Checking the answer the moment a question feels hard. The effort of trying is where the learning happens.
- Using someone else's question bank that does not match what your class covered.
Letting Grasp write the questions
Writing good questions takes time, and it is the part students tend to skip. In Grasp you pick the notes you want to be tested on, choose how many multiple choice, short answer and long answer questions you want, and it writes the quiz from your own notes. Written answers are marked against your notes, a partly right answer earns half marks, and you can ask why an answer was wrong.
Try it with your own subjects
Upload your timetable and Grasp builds a notebook for every subject.
Start with your timetable