Practice test
Sit a scored multiple-choice test built from your own Focus Cards, and find out which level of a topic you actually stop at.
1What a practice test is for
Reviewing cards tells you whether a fact comes back. It does not tell you whether you could use it under exam conditions, with four plausible answers in front of you and nobody flipping the card over.
A practice test is the measurement. It draws multiple-choice questions from one deck of your Focus Cards, scores the sitting, and tells you where your understanding runs out. It deliberately does not touch your review schedule: taking a test never reschedules a card, so measuring cannot quietly corrupt what you are measuring.
Twenty green reviews on a deck and 6/10 on its test is not a contradiction. It means you can recall those facts and cannot yet apply them, which is exactly the thing reviews cannot show you.
2Starting a test
Tests live on the deck, not on individual cards.
- Open Focus Cards and pick the deck you want to be tested on.
- Tap Practice test, then choose a length: 5, 10, or 20 questions.
- Tap Generate to have your questions written, or Start test to sit one from questions you already have.
A deck needs at least four usable cards, one to supply the answer and three to supply the wrong choices. Cards with a blank side, and cards you have suspended, are left out, so a big deck can still be short on usable ones, and the screen says when that is what happened.
3Generating questions, and what it costs
Generating reads the cards in the deck and writes questions from them, climbing from straight recall towards questions that ask you to apply and judge. The wrong answers are written to be tempting rather than obviously silly, which is the whole point of a multiple-choice check.
It costs AI credits once, and the price is on the button before you press it. What comes back is kept as a question bank on that deck, so every sitting after the first is free: Start test draws a fresh selection from the bank, and generating again only adds questions that are not already there.
If you are offline, out of credits, or generation cannot be reached, you still get a test, built on your device from the cards themselves. The screen tells you which test you are taking rather than quietly handing you the weaker one.
4Taking the test
Each question gives four choices and shows nothing but your progress. There is no right-or-wrong flash as you go, on purpose: the moment a test starts correcting you it becomes another study round, and a study round cannot measure you.
Answers stay editable. Back returns to an earlier question and changing your mind is allowed, though the first answer is the one the result is read from. The last question does not submit itself either, you finish when you say so, and Finish now ends a sitting early.
5Reading your result
The review opens on your score for the sitting. On the web a row of ticks and crosses sits beside it, one per question in the order you answered them, and pressing any of them jumps to that question below.
Under it, How it went by level breaks the sitting down by what each question asked of you, and, when there is enough evidence for it, one sentence names the ceiling: “You can recall this, but not apply it yet.” The numbers behind that claim are printed underneath, so you can check it rather than take it on trust.
Then every question is listed with what you answered and what was correct. On the phone apps you can send a miss straight to your Mistake Log, one at a time or all at once, which turns the test into the next thing to study.
If a question is wrong, ambiguous, or asks the same thing as another one, report it. It leaves your bank and will not come up again.
6Using tests well
Test after you have reviewed, not instead of reviewing. The cards build the knowledge; the test finds the edge of it, and the misses tell you what to work on next.
Keep decks about one topic. A test drawn from a deck of everything produces questions about everything, and a score you cannot act on.
Sit the same deck again a week later. The score matters far less than whether the ceiling has moved up a level.