Your study companion on the web: reminders, countdowns and mistake review

Most of what we have built so far has been about the hour you spend sitting a paper. That is the part that measures you, and it is where a practice platform earns its place. But almost nobody fails an exam during the paper. They fail it in the eight weeks before, which is made of deciding when to study, remembering to, and doing something useful with the questions they got wrong last time.

Those three things are now on the portal, at my.ismartexams.com. None of them is a dramatic feature and all three are the difference between a plan and a stack of good intentions.

Reminders, including a countdown to the exam

There are three kinds, because people need three different things from a reminder.

Each reminder can go to this browser, to the phone app, or to both — your choice per reminder, because the browser is where a plan gets made and the phone is where you actually are at seven in the evening. Browser notifications need your permission once; if you have previously refused it, the portal shows you how to turn it back on for your particular browser rather than silently failing.

Why a countdown and not just a date in a calendar

A date in a calendar tells you when the exam is. A countdown tells you how much of your preparation is left, which is a different and more uncomfortable number. Ours is named — you give it the exam, not a generic label — and it arrives at a time you set, so the eight-weeks-to-go fact turns up while you are in a position to do something about it.

The mistakes notebook

This is the part we would argue matters most. Reviewing your wrong answers once, straight after the paper, is the single most useful thing anyone does with a mock test — and it is also the thing that gets done once and never again, because nothing brings those questions back.

So the notebook brings them back. Every question you answer wrong in a submitted exam lands there automatically, with your answer and the right one beside it. From then on it moves through five boxes.

Miss a card in review and it goes straight back to box 1, due again in about twelve hours. That is the whole discipline of the thing: the schedule is decided by whether you actually know the answer, not by how recently you looked at it.

A card can also be marked fixed, which means something slightly different — you answered that question correctly in a later exam, out in the wild rather than in review. Fixed cards can still be reviewed if you want them; they are just no longer evidence of a gap.

Submitting a paper, with answered and skipped counts.

The result. Everything you got wrong goes to the notebook from here.

A focus timer that survives a real study session

Twenty-five minutes of focus, a five-minute break, a longer fifteen-minute break every fourth round. All four numbers are adjustable, and none of them is the interesting part.

The interesting part is that it keeps time from the moment each round ends rather than counting ticks while the tab is open. Reload the page, close the laptop, let it go to sleep, come back twenty minutes later — the timer knows where it is. Every browser-based timer that counts ticks loses the session the first time the machine sleeps, which on a shared or elderly laptop is roughly every session.

You can attach a round to a specific exam, so the week's chart shows where the time actually went. Those minutes are kept in your browser and are not sent to us.

What the rest of it looks like

• A calendar that puts exam notices, your own attempts and your purchases on the same dates, so a month is one picture rather than three lists.
• Achievements for real milestones — exams sat and passed, study streaks, certificates earned, mistakes mastered, focus time — each one worked out from your own record rather than handed out for signing in.
• Performance and streak pages, bookmarks and notes, and your certificates, all against the same account as the Android and iPhone apps.