You're two weeks out from an exam. You've got a stack of lecture slides, maybe a textbook chapter, and exactly zero practice questions. No past exams. No question banks. No study guide with sample problems. Just raw content and a test date that's getting closer every day.

This is one of the most common and most frustrating situations in higher education. Plenty of courses hand you mountains of material to learn but give you almost nothing to actually test yourself with. And if you've read anything about effective studying, you know that testing yourself is the single most important thing you can do.

So what do you do when there's nothing to test yourself with? You make your own.

Why Practice Questions Matter So Much

Before jumping into techniques, it helps to understand why this matters. Research on the testing effect has shown repeatedly that actively retrieving information from memory is far more effective than passively reviewing it. Every time you answer a question about the material - even if you get it wrong - you strengthen your ability to remember and apply that knowledge.

Without practice questions, most students default to re-reading their notes. This creates an illusion of competence: the material looks familiar, so you think you know it. But familiarity and actual recall are very different things. An exam doesn't ask you to recognize information - it asks you to produce it under pressure.

Practice questions bridge that gap. They force you to think, retrieve, and apply - which is exactly what the exam will demand. The question is how to get them when your course doesn't provide any.

DIY Technique 1: The Cornell Method

The Cornell note-taking system has a built-in mechanism for generating questions. The idea is to divide your notes page into two columns: a narrow left column for questions and a wider right column for your actual notes. After a lecture or reading session, you go back and write questions in the left column that correspond to the content on the right.

Even if you didn't take your original notes this way, you can retrofit it. Go through your existing notes or slides and, for each major point, write a question that would require you to reproduce that information. "What are the three types of market failure?" "Explain why osmosis is considered passive transport." "What distinguishes transformational from transactional leadership?"

The act of writing these questions is itself a study exercise because it forces you to identify what's important and how it might be tested.

DIY Technique 2: Bloom's Taxonomy Prompts

Bloom's taxonomy is a framework that categorizes cognitive skills from simple recall to complex evaluation. You can use it as a template for generating questions at different levels of difficulty.

Start with remember-level questions: "Define X." "List the steps of Y." Then move up to understand: "Explain why X leads to Y." "Compare A and B." Then apply: "Given this scenario, which principle applies?" Analyze: "What would happen if this variable changed?" And finally evaluate: "Which approach is most effective and why?"

Using this framework systematically ensures you're not just writing easy recall questions. You're creating a range of difficulty levels that mirrors what a real exam would include - from straightforward definitions to complex scenario-based problems.

DIY Technique 3: Concept Mapping Into Questions

Take a blank page and draw a concept map from memory. Put the main topic in the center, branch out to subtopics, and connect related ideas with labeled arrows that explain the relationship.

Every connection in your concept map is a potential question. "What is the relationship between X and Y?" "How does A influence B?" "Why does C depend on D?" The gaps in your concept map - the connections you couldn't draw - tell you exactly where your understanding is weakest.

This technique is especially useful for courses that test conceptual understanding and the relationships between ideas, rather than isolated facts.

The Limitation of DIY Methods

All of these techniques work. They're backed by research and used by effective learners everywhere. But they share one significant limitation: they take time. A lot of time.

Writing quality questions for a full course worth of material can take hours - hours you could be spending actually practicing those questions. There's also the problem of bias: you tend to write questions about the things you already understand well, and skip the topics you find confusing. Which means DIY questions often under-test exactly the areas where you need the most practice.

This is where a lot of students get stuck. They know they need practice questions, they know how to make them, but the effort required is almost as daunting as the exam itself.

The AI Shortcut: Generate Questions From Your Materials

AI changes this equation entirely. Instead of spending hours crafting questions by hand, you can upload your course materials and have practice questions generated in minutes. The AI reads your actual content - your lecture slides, your textbook chapters, your notes - and produces questions that directly test that material.

This isn't generic trivia. These are questions rooted in your specific course content, covering the exact topics and details your professor included in the material. And because AI doesn't have your same blind spots, it often generates questions about areas you might have skipped or underestimated.

MoreExams was built for exactly this problem. Upload your documents, choose your question types and difficulty levels, and get a complete set of practice questions ready to go. Multiple choice, short answer, true/false, essay prompts - whatever matches your exam format.

Getting Started

If you're staring at a pile of slides with no practice material, here's what to do. First, take ten minutes and try one of the DIY methods above for one topic. This gets you thinking actively about the material right away. Then, for the rest of your course content, upload it to MoreExams and generate a full set of practice questions.

The combination is powerful: you understand the skill of creating questions (which deepens your own understanding), and you have the volume of questions you actually need to practice thoroughly. Two weeks before an exam with no practice questions doesn't have to be a crisis. It can be the starting point for the most effective study sessions you've ever had.