How to get ChatGPT to quiz you on your notes

Short answer: give ChatGPT your notes as a photo, PDF or pasted text, tell it to ask one question at a time using only those notes, and answer each question before it shows you the solution. That last part is the whole trick. Reading a list of questions with the answers underneath feels like studying, but it is not a test.

Step by step

1. Get your notes in. Photograph each page flat and in good light, or upload the PDF of your slides. If your handwriting is hard to read, paste the key paragraphs as text. You get better questions from one chapter at a time than from a whole semester at once.
2. Paste the prompt. Use the multiple-choice prompt below, or switch on study mode (Tools, then Study and learn) if you see it in your account and say: "Quiz me on these notes, one question at a time."
3. Answer before you look. Type A, B, C or D, or write your answer out. Do not scroll ahead. Committing to an answer first is what makes a quiz work; the research on the testing effect is built on exactly this.
4. Ask about every miss. When you get one wrong, ask "why is that the answer, and where is it in my notes?" A two-sentence explanation tied to your own notes sticks far better than a correct letter.
5. Save what you missed. At the end, ask for a list of the questions you got wrong and copy it somewhere. You will need it tomorrow, because ChatGPT will not bring them back on its own.

Copy-paste prompts

Paste these after uploading your notes. The rules in the first one fix the problems you would otherwise run into: questions about things that were never in your notes, answers given away too early, and an answer key you can guess from the option lengths.

Multiple choice, one at a time

Quiz me on the notes I uploaded. Rules:
1. Ask one multiple-choice question at a time, four options, A to D.
2. Use only what is in my notes. If something is not in them, do not ask about it.
3. Put the correct answer in a different position each time, and keep all four options about the same length.
4. Wait for my answer. Then tell me if I was right and explain why in two sentences, quoting my notes.
5. After 10 questions, list the ones I got wrong.

Short answer, graded

Ask me 8 short-answer questions from my notes, one at a time. Do not show the answer until I reply. Grade my answer as correct, partly correct or wrong, and tell me what was missing. Ask harder questions on the topics I get wrong.

Exam-style questions

I have an exam on [topic] on [date]. Using only my notes, write questions like the ones a professor would ask on that exam: some definitions, some "explain why", some applying the idea to a new example. One at a time, wait for my answer, then grade it.

The next day: your misses first

Here are the questions I got wrong yesterday: [paste list]. Quiz me on these first, reworded so I cannot just remember the wording. Then add 5 new ones from the same notes.

How to tell if the quiz is any good

A quiz written by an AI can look fine and still be easy to beat without knowing anything. Check three things in the first five questions:

• Can you guess the answer from the shape? When we audited the 5,654 questions our own question generator had written by September 2026, the correct answer was the longest of the four options 35% of the time, where chance would be 25%, and it sat in position D only 5% of the time. That was our model, not ChatGPT, and we now shuffle the answer positions ourselves. But any model that writes questions has habits like these, which is why the prompt above asks for shuffled positions and options of equal length.
• Is every question in your notes? If a question covers something your professor never mentioned, say so. You want to practise what will be on your exam, not general knowledge.
• Do the wrong options make sense? Good distractors are mistakes a student would really make. If three options are obviously silly, you are testing reading, not memory.

Troubleshooting

• It shows all the answers at once. Say "one question at a time, and do not show the answer until I reply."
• It asks about things that are not in your notes. Add "only from my notes, and tell me if a question would need outside knowledge."
• It misreads your handwriting. Retake the photo straight on, crop to one page, or paste the text of the hard parts.
• The PDF is long and the questions only cover the start. Ask for questions chapter by chapter, or upload the sections separately.
• The questions are too easy. Ask for "explain why" and "apply this to a new example" questions, like the exam-style prompt above.

Where ChatGPT stops being enough

For a single session, ChatGPT works well, and if you mainly need a concept explained, it is better than any quiz app. It gets harder once quizzing becomes a habit. It does not keep your score from one day to the next, it does not bring back yesterday's misses unless you paste them in, and you set it up again for every new chat. That matters, because reviewing the same material across several days, spaced repetition, is what moves it into long-term memory. If you want a review plan for your exam date, the spaced repetition calculator works without any app.

That gap is why we built Quizcam. You photograph a page or import a PDF, it writes the multiple-choice questions, grades each answer with a short explanation, and brings the questions back in a daily review. You can also send a round to a friend as a link they play in their browser. One quiz a month is free, on iPhone and iPad. If you are deciding between the two, our Quizcam vs ChatGPT comparison goes through it point by point.