How to turn notes into a quiz: class notes and whiteboard photos

Your phone is probably full of them: photos of the whiteboard at the end of class, pages of handwritten notes, a diagram the teacher drew in the last five minutes. They are taken with good intentions and almost never opened again. This guide shows how to turn notes into a quiz the same evening with Study Shot, so your notes and whiteboard photos do some work before the exam instead of on the night before it.

Why your notes need questions, not rereading

Looking back over your notes feels useful, but recognising something you wrote is very different from being able to recall it with the notes closed. Research on study methods keeps finding the same thing. In Karpicke and Blunt (2011), students who practised recalling a text learned more than students who studied it by building concept maps, a much more active method than rereading.

The benefit also lasts. In Roediger and Karpicke (2006), students who tested themselves remembered clearly more two days and a week later than students who spent the same time rereading.

The obstacle is that turning a page of notes into good questions takes a long time. Study Shot does that part. Its own description is plain: "Photograph a page from a book, your notes or a whiteboard. Claude writes up to 20 questions about it."

How to turn notes into a quiz, step by step

Open Study Shot and sign in (or choose Create account with your name, email and a password).
Press Make a new quiz.
Press Choose photo to pick a whiteboard or notes photo you already have, or Take photo to snap your notebook now.
Choose how many questions, from 1 to 20. For one page of notes, 10 is often plenty; for a dense textbook page, use 20.
Choose Opus 5.5 for "Deeper questions" or Sonnet 5.5 for a faster quick review, and press Write.
Answer each question, A to D, and read the explanation after each one.

The questions start at beginner level and climb to advanced, so the first few check the terms and facts on the page, and the last few ask you to apply them.

Photographing notes and whiteboards so it works

Study Shot can only write questions about what it can read. Its own advice: "Hold the page flat and fill the frame. Textbooks, notes, diagrams and whiteboards all work." In practice:

Whiteboards: stand square to the board rather than at an angle, step close enough that the writing fills the frame, and avoid the glare spot from the lights. If the board is long, take two photos and make two quizzes.
Handwritten notes: lay the notebook flat in good light. Pencil on lined paper is harder to read than pen; if a page is faint, it is worth rewriting the key lines.
Diagrams: make sure the labels are in the photo, not cut off at the edge. A labelled diagram makes for good questions.
One topic per photo: a photo that mixes the end of one lesson and the start of another gives a scattered quiz.

Photos are accepted as JPEG, PNG, WebP or GIF up to 5 MB, and are shrunk before upload, so ordinary phone photos are fine. If a photo has nothing readable in it, Study Shot says so rather than inventing questions: "That photo doesn't show anything to study. Try a clearer shot of the page."

A worked example: one day of biology notes

Here is what one evening looks like for a student with a biology class that morning.

In class: at the end of the lesson, you take one photo of the whiteboard, which shows a labelled diagram of the heart. You also have two pages of handwritten notes on how blood moves through it.
That evening, 5 minutes: you read your notes once while the lesson is fresh, and fix one word you can no longer read.
Quiz one, the whiteboard: you choose the diagram photo, ask for 9 questions and pick Sonnet 5.5. Nine gives three questions at each level. The beginner ones ask you to name parts. The advanced ones ask what would change if one valve stopped closing properly.
Quiz two, the notes: you photograph both pages, one at a time, and make a quiz from each with Opus 5.5, because the notes cover the harder ideas.
Results: the diagram quiz comes back Mastered. The notes quizzes come back Good and Getting there. In the weaker one, Look at these again shows three misses, all about the order blood passes through the chambers.
Fix it: you redraw that path from memory, check it against your notes, and stop for the night.
Three days later: you retake the weaker quiz from your library. This time it comes back Good.

Total time on the first evening is about half an hour. The notes you would normally never open have now been tested twice.

Check the questions against your notes

Notes are written fast and are sometimes wrong, and the questions are written by an AI model that can occasionally misread a scrawl. Treat any question that surprises you as a prompt to check. The explanation after each answer shows the reasoning, so you can compare it with your notes and your textbook. If your notes were wrong, you have just found out before the exam rather than in it.

Make it a habit after each class

The best time to quiz yourself on today's notes is today, while the class is fresh enough to correct a misread word, and then again a few days later.

Same evening: photograph the day's notes and the whiteboard, and do one short quiz on each.
Later that week: open your library and press Retake quiz. Your quizzes are saved, and each card shows your best score.
Before the test: go through Look at these again on each quiz, the list of questions you missed with the right answers, and reread only those parts of your notes.

You can make up to ten new quizzes every ten minutes, which is more than enough for a day's classes. Your photos are sent to Claude to write the questions and are not stored; your quizzes and scores are kept so you can come back to them.

Frequently asked questions

Can Study Shot read handwriting?

It writes questions from photos of handwritten notes, as long as the writing is clear in the photo. Faint pencil and messy pages are harder to read, so rewrite the key lines if a page is hard to make out.

Should I photograph a whole notebook at once?

No. Take one photo per page or per topic and make a quiz from each. A focused photo gives focused questions.

What if my notes have a mistake in them?

The questions follow what is on the page, so a mistake in your notes can end up in a question. If a question or explanation surprises you, check it against your textbook.

Get started

Try Study Shot: photograph the page you are studying tonight and get up to 20 questions on it, from beginner to advanced.