Drop in a lecture handout, a past paper, or a chapter. You get a scored 10-question test drawn from the whole file, not the first two pages of it.
Bigger sets read more of your document. Included with Student and Genius.
PDF, PowerPoint, Word, or a link · up to 10 MB · start without an account
A handout, a chapter, a past paper, or anything else your course published as a PDF. Up to 10 MB.
It works through the full text layer and picks the definitions, mechanisms, and distinctions a marker would ask about.
Answer, submit, and get the correct answers with an explanation for each. The ones you missed can be redrilled.
A paragraph from a microbiology handout, and the marked paper that comes back after sitting the 10 questions written from it. Sample material, written by us to show the shape of the output.
The PDF you uploaded
Microbiology handout 6.pdf, page 41
Resistance spreads horizontally as well as by descent. Conjugation transfers a plasmid through a pilus between adjacent cells, transduction moves DNA by bacteriophage, and transformation takes up free DNA from the surrounding medium.
Your marked paper
Your score
8 of 10
3 of the 10 questions
Which mechanism moves bacterial DNA between cells using a bacteriophage as the vector?
A pilus forms between two adjacent bacteria. What is being transferred?
Why is transformation described as taking up free DNA rather than receiving it?
The DNA is already loose in the medium, usually from a lysed cell. The recipient imports it under its own competence machinery rather than being given it by a donor.
The two you missed come back on their own as a shorter round, and redrilling them spends no part of your allowance.
The scored quiz runs on every plan, Free included. Student and Genius stretch the same PDF to 30 questions over proportionally more of the document.
Tools that sample the opening pages give you a quiz about the introduction. GeniusPal works through the file end to end, so a long chapter produces questions from all of it.
A PDF made of scanned photographs carries no text. You get told that plainly instead of a set of confidently invented questions about nothing.
Each answer comes back with why it was right, so a wrong pick teaches you something rather than just costing a mark.
The scored multiple-choice quiz is the mode every plan includes, so a PDF you upload today produces a complete test without a card.
Reading PDFs all term? Read our guide to taking notes on a PDF.
Upload the PDF and GeniusPal writes a multiple-choice test from its contents, 10 questions on the Free plan and up to 30 on a paid one. Nothing is installed and no question bank is consulted, because every question is drawn from the file you supplied. The reader walks the document from beginning to end rather than sampling the opening pages, which is the difference between a test on your chapter and a test on its introduction. You can drop a file in before signing in and create a free account at the moment the quiz is generated, so the score has an account to live in. Once the set exists you can sit it, read the explanation behind every answer, and redrill whatever you got wrong, and none of that costs a second generation.
Only if the file carries a real text layer. A PDF exported from Word, LaTeX, PowerPoint, or almost any modern publishing tool carries one, and those upload and read normally. A PDF that is really a stack of photographs, which is what you get from a phone camera or an older library scanner, carries pixels and no characters at all. GeniusPal has no optical character recognition, so rather than guessing at shapes it tells you the file has no readable text and stops. That refusal is deliberate. The alternative is a quiz of invented questions about a document nobody read, which is worse than no quiz because you would revise from it. If your only copy is a scan, run it through an OCR tool first and upload the searchable version it gives back.
The ceiling is 10 MB, which comfortably covers a textbook chapter, a full lecture handout, a past paper with its mark scheme, or a term of exported slides. Length in pages matters less than you would expect, because the reader works through the whole text rather than stopping at a page count. What a longer document changes is how much of it one set of 10 questions can cover, which is why a paid plan raising the ceiling to 30 widens coverage rather than just adding questions about the same passages. If a file is larger than 10 MB, split it and upload the parts. Re-uploading a document you have already used does not start it over either, since GeniusPal recognises the material by its text and carries on into the next stretch of it.
Scored multiple choice is the mode included on every tier, so the Free plan gives you the whole tool rather than a crippled preview of it: 2 complete quizzes written from your own PDFs, marked, explained, and redrillable, with no card taken. The limit is on generations rather than features, and those 2 arrive once for the lifetime of the account instead of refilling monthly, so a third PDF needs a plan. Student costs $14.99 a month for 100 generations; Genius is $59.99 once for a year under a fair-use ceiling of 1000 a month. Paying also lifts a paper to 30 questions and unlocks flashcard and written recall over the same set. Redrilling the questions you missed costs nothing on any plan, and sitting a whole quiz again from the start is covered 2 times per set on Free and left uncounted on both paid tiers.
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