RemNote's exam scheduler allows you to adjust your study schedule to achieve mastery by an upcoming exam date. You set an exam date for a particular folder or document and choose a study plan; RemNote does the rest.
The exam scheduler is a Pro feature, but you can try it for free for your first exam to see if it's useful to you.
What the scheduler does
Configuring an exam makes some small changes to the base scheduler configured for the cards in the exam:
Prioritization: Flashcards from exams are prioritized first in your global queue, so you'll see flashcards from exams before your Currently Studying ones, and they sit at the top of the list of documents in the Flashcard Home.
Final Review Period: In the last few days before your exam, every flashcard is shown one last time, whether or not it would otherwise be due. This makes sure your knowledge is top-of-mind on the exam date.
Review Separation: You can practice the flashcards you've never seen and the ones that are due separately. Studying usually means adding fresh material as you go, so being able to split the queue lets you spend a session learning new ideas, or a session practicing what you already know, rather than mixing the two.
For an account of the exact problems with a standard spaced-repetition schedule the exam scheduler seeks to solve and how it does so, read Understanding the Exam Scheduler.
In addition to the scheduling changes, exams provide several tools for your convenience:
Calendar: In the Flashcard Home, choose the Exams tab to see a summary of the practice needed on upcoming exam flashcards.
Customize Practice Amount: You can customize the maximum target number of cards per day, the desired number of repetitions for each card, and the start date for each exam, so you can plan what your semester will look like ahead of time.
Daily Goal Adjustments: When the flashcards in your exam change, your daily goal changes with them so you still finish everything in time. Small adjustments happen on their own. When the change is large enough that you would feel it, RemNote asks you first and shows you what the new goal would be.
Notifications: If you fall behind in practicing for an exam, or have cards due to be reviewed, RemNote will send you reminders. You can customize this in Settings > Notifications.
Creating an exam
You can open the exam setup menu in three places:
From a folder: open a folder, click the + button in the top right corner, and select Exam.
From a document: click the dropdown arrow next to the Practice button at the top right, then select Exam.
From the Flashcard Home: choose Flashcards in the sidebar, open the Exams tab, and click Create Exam
The menu then walks you through the following steps:
Select your study material: Create the exam from the current document or folder, including anything nested inside it, or pick additional documents to add.
Choose your exam date.
Set your flashcard creation goals: Tell RemNote whether you've finished adding flashcards or plan to add more.
If you're still adding, estimate roughly how many you'll add per week, and the scheduler will spread your daily practice load so you're still ready by exam day.
Note: If a flashcard is at risk of being forgotten, or you have a large backlog to get through, the scheduler may still ask you to practice on days you didn't prioritize.
Decide how to schedule unpracticed cards: If the material you selected contains flashcards you have never practiced, choose how RemNote should handle them
Add a Final Review Period: Turn this on to bring every flashcard back into your queue one last time a couple of days before the exam. Seeing everything once more keeps the material fresh and makes it easier to retrieve on the day.
Confirm your daily goal: Review your projected daily flashcard goal, which the scheduler automatically calculates based on your total card count.
Customize your study days: Deselect any days of the week you don't plan to study, and RemNote will distribute your due flashcards across the days that remain. This means you can take a day off without a backlog building up.
Ensure Mastery: Turn this on to require two correct answers in a row before a flashcard counts as mastered. If you get one wrong, the scheduler pulls it earlier, which helps with the flashcards you keep forgetting.
Review your study plan: You'll see a summary of everything you chose. Click the pencil icon next to any item to change it, or click Advanced Settings to customize further, including which spaced-repetition scheduler the exam uses.
Click Confirm Schedule.
That's it! You can now trust RemNote to keep you on track for your exam and automatically adjust your upcoming practice sessions. After setting your exam date, a new exam section appears directly in your daily goal.
You can also visit Settings > Daily Goal to adjust whether or not your daily practice target includes flashcards from all of your documents, or only cards from the Exams and Currently Studying categories.
Your exam also appears in the list of documents on the Home tab of the Flashcard Home, and on the Exams tab, where you can see your overall progress.
The catch up period
If you already have a backlog of overdue flashcards in the document when you create the exam, the scheduler will suggest a catch up period to get you back on track safely.
This is a window of time scheduled just before your normal learning period starts. Clearing the backlog first means you're caught up on your existing material before you begin learning anything new.
During this catch up period your daily learning goal is temporarily raised to cover the extra flashcards. Once the backlog is gone, the schedule returns to a lighter load for the rest of your study plan.
The same suggestion appears later if you fall behind: you'll see a warning on the Flashcard Home offering an adjustment to your daily goal, which you can accept as suggested or change to whatever suits you.
New cards to learn
If you add new AI-generated or imported flashcards, or manually create your own new cards and choose to spread them out in the exam scheduler, a Cards to Learn section appears under Today's Goal in the Flashcard Home. If you fall behind on this new material, you'll see a warning offering to adjust your learning schedule.
When you're ready to learn them, RemNote shows you a Choose What to Learn Next screen before the session starts, where you settle two things.
The first is how the material is presented: as regular flashcards, or in Multiple-Choice Mode, which scaffolds your understanding while the ideas are still new.
The second is what order it arrives in.
Learning in order follows the order the flashcards appear in your documents, which is the right choice when each idea depends on the one before it, as in a chapter where every section assumes the last.
Shuffling mixes them instead, which is usually better once each flashcard makes sense on its own.
Note: Multiple-Choice Mode is an AI feature.
Tracking your progress
Hover over the Exam Progress bar to see more detail, including the total number of flashcard practices left between now and the exam date. If you have 100 flashcards to practice 4 times each, for example, that shows as 400 practices remaining.
Study periods
When you configure an exam, RemNote splits the time between your start date and the exam date into study periods. You can see them in the graph during setup.
Learning Period: every flashcard you haven't seen yet is introduced here. A flashcard leaves the learning period after two repetitions. This period is always present, so you have time to actually understand the ideas you made flashcards on.
Catch Up Period: if you started with a backlog and there's time before the exam, this window comes first, with a temporarily raised daily goal to clear it.
Final Review Period: right before the exam, every flashcard comes back one more time, so the material is fresh and easy to retrieve on the day.
Advanced settings
Whenever you create or edit an exam, all your chosen parameters are summarized on the Review your study plan page of the exam setup menu. You can edit, remove, or adjust any of them there, and the scheduler recalculates your upcoming practice sessions to match.
Most of the options on this page are the settings described above; the summary screen is just a convenient place to revisit them before you finalize the exam. The defaults marked Recommended are fine for most people, so if you're not excited about more options, there's no need to touch them.
One setting appears only here:
Spaced Repetition scheduler: choose which spaced-repetition scheduler applies to this exam. For the theory behind it, read Understanding Spaced Repetition.
The study plan page
Every exam also has its own study plan page, which you reach by clicking the exam. It gives a fuller view of your exam timeline and structure than the setup summary does.
For more on it, read Exam Study Plan.
Frequently asked questions
I have added new cards to my exam, how can I be sure I will study them?
The scheduler recalculates your daily practice load to cover the new material, so you still get through everything before exam day. If you add a large batch at once, or fall behind on learning it, RemNote shows a warning and suggests an adjustment, such as a catch up period, to get you back on track.
Does the exam scheduler consider pre-exam flashcard practice?
Yes. It builds on your existing spaced-repetition schedule rather than resetting your progress. Practices you've already done count toward the progress bar on the exam page, alongside the practices still ahead of you. Flashcards you've never seen are separated into their own section, while the ones you've practiced before are scheduled according to how well you did on them.
I have lots of exams coming up. How can I keep track of everything?
In the Flashcard Home, choose the Exams tab to see your exam dates and an estimate of how many flashcards you'll need to practice for each one on each day. Since practice dates depend on how well you remember each flashcard at the time, we can't predict the exact number due on a particular day.
