College & grad school
Nobody holds
office hours at 1am.
Which is, reliably, when the problem set makes no sense. Photograph it — or the lecture notes, or the page of the textbook you have read four times — and work it through with a tutor that explains instead of answering.
Start free — no cardPoint it at the actual course
Not a generic statistics module written for nobody. Your problem set, your lecture slides, your professor's particular way of framing it — the skills that come out are the ones your course is testing, tracked from learning to mastered.
- 1Photograph the materialA problem set, a textbook page, a slide, a page of your own notes. It reads what is on it and pulls out the concepts underneath, which is usually fewer things than the page makes it look.
- 2Get taught, not answeredThe tutor explains the concept and walks the method. It will not simply hand over the solution, which is the single most important difference between this and the thing your classmates are pasting into at midnight.
- 3Then be askedPractice built from that material, with the explanation sitting behind every miss. Being made to produce an answer is what moves a skill; re-reading the slide deck is not.
The ones that thin the room out
Those are the suggestions a college profile is offered; the box underneath takes whatever you are actually registered for.
The problem with week three
A semester is precisely long enough for the thing you understood in September to have quietly left by the time it is examined. Mastery here fades on purpose, which means the app knows what is going and brings it back before it is gone — so revision starts from a list of what actually needs it, rather than from the first page of the notes and a highlighter.
That list is the whole point. Finals week is lost by people who spend it on the material they already knew.
Graduate coursework, too
A graduate profile gets a different tutor: precise terminology, no softening, and mistakes explained by connecting them to the concept the course is actually testing rather than to the arithmetic you slipped on. Econometrics, biostatistics, the methods course everybody in the cohort is quietly struggling with.
What we don't do, and where to go instead
No admissions exams. There is no GRE, LSAT, GMAT or MCAT practice here, and we would rather say so on the way in than let you find out three clicks later. Those are specialized, heavily gamed tests and doing them badly would be worse than not doing them.
What we do have, if an exam is what brought you: the ACCUPLACER, which decides which courses you start in, and the TEAS, the entrance exam for most nursing and allied-health programs. Both are practiced in full, on the adults page.
The placement and entry exams →Six things that actually move a grade
Snap it the night it confuses you
The gap between attending a lecture and understanding it is where the whole semester is lost, and it is widest on the day. A photograph takes ten seconds and turns a vague fog into a named list of concepts.
Stop re-reading the slides
Re-reading is the most popular study method and close to the least effective. It builds familiarity, which feels exactly like knowledge right up until the exam asks you to produce something.
Revisit week three in week six
Not in week fourteen. The material fades here on a schedule, so the review comes back round while bringing it back is still cheap.
Study the skill you are avoiding
Everybody drills what they are already decent at, because it feels productive. Per-skill mastery is uncomfortable precisely because it points at the other thing.
Explain it to something
If you cannot say the method out loud without looking, you cannot do it under exam conditions. Ask the tutor to let you explain it back — it is the cheapest test of understanding there is.
Use it at the hour you are stuck
Real office hours are on Tuesday at two. The problem set is incomprehensible at one in the morning. This is free and awake at both.
A tutoring center charges by the hour
And it keeps its own hours. This is free, it is aimed at the course you are actually taking, and it does not close. LeftStart is run as a nonprofit project — not yet a registered 501(c)(3), which the donate page explains — and free for every learner whether or not anybody gives.
Why it's free →Photograph the thing you are stuck on.
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