Practising

Choosing what to practise

The row of settings at the top decides what you get. Once a question arrives they collapse to a single summary line — press Change to open them again.

Topic: A topic from your subject, or Random topic to be given anything. Random is the honest way to revise, because you don't get to pick the ones you like.
Style: Exam question is written the way a real exam question is. Skill mastery is a drill: one skill, several short parts, getting harder as you go.
Question type: Multiple choice, short answer, or extended response.
Difficulty: Easy, Standard or Hard.
Calculator: Changes the question you're given, not what you're allowed to use. Ask for No calculator and you'll get numbers that work out by hand.
Skills (optional): Narrow a topic to up to three specific skills.
Specific request (optional): Free text, e.g. “set it in a sports context”. A request always writes you a brand new question.

A question is tagged from bank or newly generated. Bank questions are hand-written and checked; generated ones are made for you on the spot and take about half a minute. You will not be given the same question twice once you've submitted it.

Writing your working

There are three tabs above the pad:

Maths — handwritten working. The usual one.
Written Text — handwritten words, for questions that ask you to explain something.
Sketch — a drawing or graph. Not converted to text; it is sent as a picture.

Switching tabs keeps what you wrote in the other one. You can write algebra on Maths, then explain it on Written Text, and submit both.

The pen tools

Pen / Eraser
S / M / L — stroke thickness
Four colours — black, blue, red, green
Undo, Redo, Clear
+ Space — makes the pad taller when you run out of room. Use it rather than cramming.

Watch the transcription

About a second after you lift your pen, your writing appears as typed maths under the pad. That is what gets marked, so glance at it.

If it has misread something, you can rewrite that bit more clearly — but you do not have to. A misread does not cost you marks.

Write each step on its own line. The marking works line by line, so one line per step is what lets it tell you where something went wrong instead of just that it did.

Extra help on the question

📖 Ch 3.2 — opens the textbook section that teaches this skill.
💡 Explain — a worked example of the skill, written on the spot. It sits below the model solution deliberately, so it's there when you want more help rather than in the way.

Submitting

Press Submit for marking. Marking takes a few seconds. Once marks come back the pad locks — your work is kept exactly as you wrote it, and you can see it again later in My results.

Next: how marking works.

Still stuck? Get in touch and tell us what you were doing when it went wrong.