Listen up, students: my favorite study app just got a huge update that makes it so much better - and it's still free!

Long-standing education app Quizlet has been the cornerstone of my academic success since I was about fourteen years old, back when you had to make your digital flashcards manually and it probably took more time to do that than actually to learn the material. I haven’t thought about Quizlet since I first graduated from university, but now that I’m heading back to grad school I thought I would check in on Old Faithful - and it looks like the study app has received the full AI treatment, and I’m shocked to say that I absolutely love it!

The platform now offers far more study tools to get you through your classes, including the use of generative artificial intelligence to help you ace your classes. These tools include practice tests, study guides, ‘blasts’, and categories. With a few weeks to go before I’m back in the classroom, I decided to give each of these features a go and see how artificial intelligence has improved Quizlet .

Getting back into the groove

Practice tests are one of my favorite features, because you can upload PDF documents and even handwritten notes to Quizlet, and the AI will generate personalized practice tests for you based on the content you’ve uploaded.

I love the idea of getting precise practice tests for the material you’re studying rather than looking around online for tests that may or may not cover everything you might need to learn. One issue I had with Quizlet back in the day was that you had to create or search for ready-made practice tests and it was quite rare to find a full test that covered your specific syllabus - so you’d have to skip or ignore irrelevant questions entirely, which would affect your scores.

I uploaded one of the curriculum datasheets I have for one of my classes and not only did it whip up a test for me to take, but it also gave me the option to instantly create flashcards and a study guide that organized my 70-page document in concise, easy to understand notes. From what I can tell, despite the AI simplifying the content, nothing important seemed to have been lost and I was able to expand information where needed.

More to love

I absolutely adore Quizlet without the AI addition, even if it can be a bit finicky to get the right content for you up and ready for you to digest. This is one of the few places someone as skeptical of AI as myself can really say it has dramatically improved a platform and will definitely improve a lot of people’s learning experience.

These generative AI features aren’t locked behind a paywall either, which is really shocking to me considering so many AI tools now require some sort of subscription or one-time payment to use. There is the option to pay for the more advanced AI features like Q-chat, which uses generative AI in a kind of chatbot way to act as an AI tutor to help you go over your notes. You can try this feature out for free, so I had it use some of my own content as well as study sets already available on the platform - and now I’m quite honestly tempted to pay for it!

In the chat, you can select what topic of yours you’d like to go over, and then the AI will give you options. You’ve got ‘teach me’, ‘quiz me’, and ‘apply my knowledge’, or you can ask a specific question and get an answer.

Bear in mind that these answers or quizzes are entirely based on the information you provide Quizlet, so you’re not likely to get the kind of answers from questions you’d get from chatbots like ChatGPT or Google Gemini. However, this could prove beneficial, as internet-scraping bots have a concerning tendency to provide inaccurate or non-contextual information.

When I used the teaching option, I found it pretty true-to-life for a typical classroom setting. The AI tutor will give you a brief outline of the content and then follow up with some questions to keep you involved and interactive, so you’re not just being spammed with walls of text. If you happen to be a bit lost or confused you can type in your question and have the AI answer it for you with examples from your study material.

While I am grateful to have access to the new and improved Quizlet right before I go into my master's degree, I do wish I had something like this when I was attending university virtually during the pandemic, because it would have made all those lonely hours at my desk much more productive if I’d had something as interactive as this to help me learn during quarantine.

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