I Built an App Because My Course Had No Practice Questions

A few months ago, I was staring at my course syllabus four days before the exam, feeling stuck. I had a mountain of lecture slides, no lecture recordings, and maybe one or two previous exams floating around — with no solutions. That was it. No question banks. No practice material worth anything.

If you've ever been in that situation, you know the feeling. You read through the material, you highlight things, you tell yourself you understand it — but deep down you have no idea if you'd actually pass the test. There's no way to know what you know until someone asks you the right questions.

So I thought: what if I could generate those questions myself, automatically, from the material I already had?

The Problem with Studying Without Questions

Most students rely on passive study methods. Re-reading slides, highlighting sentences, staring at the same pages hoping something sticks. Research has shown for decades that this barely works. Active recall — testing yourself on the material — is one of the most effective study techniques. But it requires something most courses don't give you: enough practice questions.

Some courses have past exams with full solutions. Some textbooks have end-of-chapter questions. But plenty of courses, especially at the university level, give you dozens of slide decks and almost nothing to actually test yourself with. Maybe a past exam or two if you're lucky, but with no answers, you can't even tell if you got the questions right.

That was exactly my situation. Tons of content to learn, no efficient way to turn it into actual practice. So I decided to make my own.

Two Days to Build It

I'm a developer, so my instinct was to build something. With four days until the exam, I gave myself two days to build a tool and two days to study with it. Crazy? Maybe. But re-reading slides for four days wasn't going to cut it either.

The idea was simple: upload your course documents, and let AI generate high-quality practice questions from them. Multiple choice, true/false, short answer, fill-in-the-blank — the kind of questions you'd actually see on an exam.

I built the first version in two intense days. Upload a PDF, generate questions, practice them. The early output was rough — some questions were too easy, some oddly worded. But a surprising number of them were genuinely good. They tested concepts I'd glossed over. They forced me to think about relationships between ideas I hadn't connected.

By the end of day two, I had a working app with different question types, difficulty levels, a practice mode to quiz myself, and flashcards for key concepts. Not polished, but functional. Now I had to actually use it.

Two Days to Study — And It Actually Worked

Here's what I didn't expect: two days of studying with this app was more effective than any study session I'd had before.

I uploaded all my course materials and generated hundreds of questions. Then I just started practicing, over and over. The questions approached topics from angles I hadn't considered. They exposed gaps in my knowledge that I would never have found by re-reading my notes for the tenth time. I wasn't just memorizing answers — I was actually understanding the material at a deeper level.

By the evening before the exam, I was consistently scoring well in practice sessions on material that had felt impossible two days earlier. I went to bed feeling cautiously optimistic for the first time.

When I sat down for the real exam, nothing felt unfamiliar. I'd already been tested on most of the core concepts, just phrased differently. I passed comfortably — and honestly, I don't think I would have without this tool. Two days to build it, two days to study with it, and I passed an exam I genuinely thought I might fail.

That was the moment I realized this wasn't just a personal side project. This was something other students needed too.

Why Practice Questions Matter More Than You Think

There's a concept in learning science called the testing effect. Every time you try to retrieve information from memory — even if you get it wrong — you strengthen the neural pathways that store that information. Passive review doesn't do this. Only active testing does.

The problem has never been that students don't know this. The problem is that creating practice questions is tedious, and finding good ones for your specific course is often impossible. That's the gap MoreExams fills.

You upload your lecture notes, textbook chapters, or any study material. The AI reads through it and generates questions that actually test understanding, not just surface-level recall. Then you practice, see what you got wrong, and the system helps you focus on your weak spots.

What MoreExams Is Today

What started as a tool I built for one exam has grown into a full study platform. You can create courses, upload multiple documents, generate hundreds of questions across different types and difficulty levels. There's a practice mode, flashcard mode, and full exam simulations with scoring and time limits.

Students use it for everything from university courses to professional certifications. Some upload a single PDF and generate a quick quiz. Others build comprehensive question banks across an entire semester of material.

The thing I'm most proud of is that it stays true to the original idea: give students a way to actively test themselves on their own course material, without spending hours making flashcards by hand.

If You're Studying for Something Right Now

If you're preparing for an exam and you feel like you don't have enough practice material — that's exactly why I built this. Upload what you have, generate questions, and start testing yourself. It takes about two minutes to get your first batch of practice questions.

I built MoreExams because I needed it. It ended up helping me more than I expected, and I hope it does the same for you.