Study Smarter: Turn Your Class Notes Into Practice Quizzes
Upload your class notes as a PDF and instantly generate practice quiz questions. Nontrivial creates multiple choice, ordering, matching, and numeric questions from your study materials—no manual flashcard entry required. Play solo or compete with your study group in real-time. Free, browser-based, no app download needed.
Most study apps want you to type out flashcards one by one. That's fine if you have three hours to kill before an exam. You probably don't.
Nontrivial takes a different approach: upload your notes as a PDF, and it generates quiz questions automatically. No manual entry. No copy-pasting definitions.
How it actually works
- Go to nontrivial.app and sign in
- Click "Play" to create a new game
- Drag your PDF into the upload area (lecture slides, textbook chapter, study guide—whatever you've got)
- Optionally add context like "Focus on Chapter 3" or "Questions about cell biology only"
- Pick how many questions you want (5, 10, or 20)
- Choose a difficulty level
- Hit create
The questions generate in about 30 seconds. Then you're playing.
What makes this different from Quizlet
Quizlet is great if you want to memorize term-definition pairs. But most exams don't work that way. They test whether you understood the material—not whether you can recall that mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.
Nontrivial generates questions that require comprehension. Upload a PDF about the French Revolution and you might get asked to put events in chronological order, match leaders to their factions, or estimate the year something happened. These question types force you to think, not just recognize.
The app supports multiple question formats:
- Multiple choice — standard, but the distractors are plausible
- Ordering — arrange items in sequence (dates, steps in a process, rankings)
- Matching — pair concepts together (terms to definitions, causes to effects)
- Numeric — estimate a value within a tolerance (populations, dates, measurements)
- Text input — type the answer yourself, no hints
Studying with friends
Solo practice is fine. Competing against your study group is better.
Create a group on Nontrivial, upload the same PDF everyone's studying from, and run a quiz. Scores update live. You see who answered what. After the game, you get a detailed breakdown showing which questions you got wrong and why.
There's something about seeing your roommate beat you on the Constitutional Law quiz that makes you actually want to review the commerce clause.
The PDF thing
Not every PDF works equally well. Dense, text-heavy documents produce better questions than slides with mostly images. A 50-page chapter works better than a 2-page outline.
If you've got handwritten notes, scan them to PDF first. The text extraction isn't perfect, but it usually gets enough to generate useful questions.
You can also add a prompt to focus the questions: "Only ask about the graphs" or "Ignore the examples, focus on the theorems." This helps when you're cramming specific sections.
When it's useful
Before exams. Upload your professor's slides and run through 20 questions. The immediate feedback shows you where your gaps are while there's still time to fix them.
Group study sessions. Instead of everyone silently rereading the textbook, turn it into a competition. The person who loses buys coffee.
Reviewing old material. Upload notes from earlier in the semester. Spaced repetition works, and this is more engaging than re-reading.
Testing whether you actually understand something. If you can answer questions generated from the material, you probably know it. If you can't, you know what to review.
Limits
The question generation isn't perfect. Sometimes it asks something too specific or misunderstands the source material. You can skip questions that don't make sense.
PDFs with heavy formatting, tables, or images sometimes confuse the parser. Plain text documents convert best.
There's a 32MB upload limit. That covers most things, but if you're trying to quiz yourself on a 400-page textbook, split it into chapters.
Try it
Go to nontrivial.app, upload something you're supposed to be studying, and see if you actually know it.
The free tier is enough for most students. You don't need to install anything—it runs in your browser on phone or laptop.
If nothing else, it's more productive than telling yourself you'll "review your notes later."