Upload what you are studying and get questions to answer from memory. You write the answer first, then check it, which is the whole point of active recall.
Bigger sets read more of your document. Included with Student and Genius.
Upload a past paper on its own and we work out how it asks: the topics it keeps returning to, whether it wants an option picked or an answer written, how hard it pitches, and the words it uses to ask. Your notes still supply every fact and every answer, and nothing from the paper is copied into your questions.
The difference shows up most in written practice, which comes with Student and Genius. Multiple-choice wording moves much less.
You can add one once your first set is ready.
An estimate from one paper, never a prediction of what your exam will ask.
PDF, PowerPoint, Word, or a link · up to 10 MB · start without an account
Notes, a PDF, or a slide deck. GeniusPal turns it into a set of questions worth answering.
The question comes up with the answer hidden. You write what you can remember before anything is revealed.
Compare what you wrote against the answer and mark it missed, almost, or got it. What you missed comes back around.
A page of chemistry notes, the prompt written from it, and the moment you compare what you wrote. Sample material, written by us to show the shape of the output.
Your notes
Chemical equilibrium notes.md
The prompt GeniusPal writes
A gaseous equilibrium is compressed into a smaller volume. Say which way the position of equilibrium moves, and why.
What you wrote from memory
It moves to the side with fewer gas molecules so the pressure comes back down.
The model answer, revealed after you commit
Compression raises the pressure, so by Le Chatelier the equilibrium shifts toward the side with fewer moles of gas, which lowers the pressure again.
Then you grade yourself
Written recall is included with Student and Genius. Every generated set is scoreable as a quiz on every plan, Free included.
Multiple choice lets you pick the familiar-looking option. Writing the answer from a blank screen is the version of testing that actually builds recall.
You decide whether what you wrote was good enough. Marking honestly is what makes the next round useful, and nothing is scored against you.
Anything you mark as missed returns ahead of the material you already have, so your time goes where the gaps are.
One upload gives you a scored multiple-choice quiz, and a paid plan adds the recall drill and a flashcard deck over the same material.
New to the technique? Read our guide to active recall and spaced repetition.
It is a tool that turns your study material into questions you answer from memory rather than reread. GeniusPal writes the questions from the file you upload, so what you are asked comes from your own syllabus rather than a generic bank. The technique behind it is the most consistently supported finding in the study literature: trying to retrieve something makes it easier to retrieve next time, while rereading it mostly makes it feel familiar. Familiarity is the trap, because a page you have read four times feels known right up until the moment you have to produce it with the page closed. Writing the questions is the part students skip, since it takes longer than reading and requires you to already know what matters. Handing that step to GeniusPal removes the reason most people never do recall properly.
A quiz gives you options to choose between, so recognising the right answer is enough, and recognition is a much weaker signal than it feels like. A recall drill hides the answer entirely and asks you to produce it from a blank screen, then lets you grade what you wrote against the model answer. The gap between the two is where most exam surprises come from: you can pick the right option out of four while being unable to write two sentences on the same idea unprompted. Both modes run over the same generated set, so you can sit the quiz to find your weak areas quickly and then drill those in recall, where the work is harder and the feedback is more honest. The quiz is available on every plan, and the written recall drill unlocks with Student or Genius.
You do. GeniusPal shows the model answer next to what you wrote and you mark it missed, almost, or got it. Self-grading is deliberate, since only you know whether you really had the idea or wrote a near-miss that happened to share some words with the answer. Automatic marking would have to guess at that, and a wrong guess in either direction is worse than useless: mark a blank answer correct and you will skip the topic, mark a good answer wrong and you waste a revision session on something you know. Nothing you write is scored against you or shown to anyone, which is what makes honest grading cheap. The one rule worth holding yourself to is to grade after reading the model answer rather than while reading it, so you are judging what you produced.
Not as a calendar. There are no due dates, no daily queue, and no notification telling you that eleven cards are ready. Within a set, questions you mark as missed are brought back ahead of the ones you got, so repetition is driven by how you actually did rather than by a fixed schedule. A question has to come back correctly on a streak before it stops being treated as weak, which means the drill keeps narrowing onto the material you have not got yet. If a full spaced-repetition scheduler that tracks thousands of cards over months is what you want, a dedicated tool like Anki does that properly and this is a different product. What GeniusPal does is make one session land on your weak spots. Across weeks, the thing that brings you back is your own material: uploading the next section of the same document carries on from where the last set left off rather than starting the chapter again.
Writing the questions is free; answering them from a blank screen is the paid part. That deserves saying first rather than buried in a table. The Free plan generates 2 sets of recall questions from your own notes at no cost and with no card, every one of which is scoreable as a quiz, and the written drill where you produce an answer and grade it yourself opens on a paid plan. Those 2 arrive once for the account and do not return monthly. Student sits at $14.99 each month for 100 sets; Genius takes $59.99 for a full year under a fair-use ceiling of 1000 monthly. Either one widens a set from 10 questions to 30, drawn across proportionally more of whatever you uploaded. Re-answering questions inside a set you already generated is free on every plan, so the meter runs on new material rather than on how hard you drill it.
If you want a scheduler that tracks thousands of cards over months, quite possibly. We compared the field: the best spaced repetition apps, and the best Anki alternatives.