A practice exam on your own syllabus
A practice exam is thirty open questions drawn from the lectures you actually attended, each with the answer that would be expected. Not generic questions about the subject: questions about your course, from your lecturer, including the aside in week six. You answer out loud first, then compare.
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What it is, concretely
Thirty open questions — the kind a person asks, not multiple choice — built by reading every lecture in the course. Each question comes with a model answer: what a good response would contain, based on how the material was presented in your lectures.
It is generated on demand, when you decide the course is ready for it, rather than arriving automatically with each lecture. A practice exam in week two would be an exam on a fifth of a syllabus.
Why bother, if you already have the notes
Because reading and answering are two different skills, and only one of them is examined. You can read a chapter four times, feel entirely on top of it, and then be unable to produce two connected sentences when someone asks the question out loud.
The gap between «I recognise this» and «I can explain this» is invisible from the inside. The only reliable way to find it is to try to explain something before anyone is marking you.
The uncomfortable half hour with a practice exam is the cheapest version of the uncomfortable half hour in the exam room.
The whole syllabus, not the first three topics
When you make questions for yourself, you make them about the parts you remember — which are, by definition, not the parts that will catch you out. Every lecture in the course is read for this, so the questions come from across the whole thing.
That includes the lectures you were half-awake for. Those tend to produce the questions worth having, precisely because nothing about them feels familiar.
How to use it
Generate it from the course
Once the lectures are in, ask for the practice exam. It reads all of them together — this is a course-level tool, not a lecture-level one.
Answer out loud, properly
Not in your head, and not «I know this one». Say the answer as if someone were listening. The difference between the two is the entire value of the exercise.
Then uncover the answer and compare
Not to mark yourself, but to spot what you left out. What you consistently leave out is your revision list for tomorrow.
What it is not
- It is not a prediction of your exam paper. Nobody can do that, and a tool that claims to is selling you something. It is practice on your own material.
- It is not marked. No score, no grade. It shows you a model answer and lets you compare — judging your own answer is part of the exercise.
- It does not know your lecturer’s past papers. It knows what was said in the lectures you uploaded, and nothing else.
- It is not a substitute for the notes, which is where the reasoning lives.
What to alternate it with in the last week
A practice exam is heavy: thirty open questions is a real session, and doing it daily produces diminishing returns fast. The other course-level tools are lighter and test different things.
- A scored multiple-choice quiz — thirty questions with a score and explanations, for the days when you want a number.
- The course flashcard deck — for facts, in ten-minute pieces.
- The five-minute briefing — the key concepts and the common thread, for the morning of.
- The study plan — what to cover on which of the days you have left.
One question, and the answer expected of you
Explain the difference between validity and soundness in a deductive argument, and say why an argument can be valid and still tell you nothing true about the world. Give an example.
Validity is a property of the form: if the premises were true, the conclusion would have to be true. It says nothing about whether the premises are in fact true.
Soundness is validity plus true premises. A sound argument is valid and its premises hold, so its conclusion is true.
The consequence to state explicitly: a valid argument with false premises can have a false conclusion, and this is not a defect in the logic.
An example of the right shape: all cats are made of glass; my neighbour’s pet is a cat; therefore it is made of glass. Valid, not sound.
A made-up example: we wrote the course material behind it ourselves. No real exam paper and no real lecturer’s material ever appears on this page.
Questions about the practice exam
How many questions are there?
Thirty open questions, each with a model answer. They are drawn from every lecture in the course, not only from the topics that are easiest to make questions about.
Are the questions multiple choice?
No — these are open questions of the kind a person asks. There is a separate multiple-choice quiz tool if you want a score.
Does it predict what my exam will ask?
No, and nothing can. It is practice on your own course material: the questions come from what your lecturer actually said, which is a much better basis than a generic question bank, but it is not a prediction.
When should I generate it?
When most of the course is uploaded. Run earlier, it can only examine the part of the syllabus that exists.
How many lectures does it need?
It reads whatever is in the course. The more of the syllabus is there, the more the practice exam resembles the real one in coverage.
Test yourself before your examiner does
Upload the lectures for one course and run a practice exam on it. Thirty questions, out loud, and you will know exactly where you stand.
Your first two lectures are free. No credit card needed.