Bonsai No. 03 · The tools

Practice tests on whatever you are studying

Name a topic — or hand it your own notes — and get a real test back. Sat, marked, and returned with feedback on the ones you missed.

Try it Three questions on photosynthesis. Answer them and see what comes back.

1Which process converts light energy into chemical energy in plants?

2Chlorophyll absorbs mostly green light.

3Name the gas a plant takes in during photosynthesis.

A fixed three-question sample. A real one is five, ten or fifteen questions on whatever you name, in any mix of the five types below.

Build the test

  1. Say what it is on. Be as narrow as you like. Photosynthesis works; photosynthesis, the light-dependent reactions works better, and gets you a test about the thing you are actually behind on.
  2. Add your material, if you have it. Drop in images or text files — a photograph of your notes, the lecture slides, the chapter. Questions then come from what your course actually taught, not from the internet's general idea of the topic.
  3. Choose the shape. Five, ten or fifteen questions, in any mix of the five types.
Length 51015
Types Multiple choice Multiple select True / False Short answer Free response
Reference files are optional and take images or text. Pick more than one type and the test is built from a mix of them.

Sit it properly

It behaves like a test, not a stack of flashcards. Every question is on the page, you work through them in your own time, and nothing is marked until you submit — so there is no drip of little green ticks steering you as you go.

That matters more than it sounds. Immediate per-question feedback quietly turns recall practice into recognition practice, and recognition is the thing that feels like knowing and then deserts you in an exam hall.

Get it marked

Submit and you get a score, then a question-by-question breakdown: what you put, what the answer was, and — where you went wrong — feedback on the specific mistake rather than a restatement of the right answer.

Written answers are marked too, not skipped. Short and free-response questions get read and judged, and anything genuinely ambiguous is handed back flagged for your own review instead of being quietly guessed at.

No two questions asking the same thing

Ask any generator for fifteen questions on one topic and it will cheerfully write you the same question fifteen ways — What is ½ + ¼? and then Find the sum of ½ and ¼, with different options and a different right answer, three questions apart.

Bonsai compares what each question actually asks — the claim, the numbers, the answer choices — and throws the repeats away before the test ever reaches you.

A fifteen-question test is fifteen questions. If a topic genuinely does not have fifteen distinct things in it, you get a shorter test and a note saying so, which is the honest answer.

See it Six questions a generator produced on fractions.
  • 1.What is 1/2 + 1/4?
  • 2.Find the sum of 1/2 and 1/4.
  • 3.Which fraction is equivalent to 2/4?
  • 4.Simplify 6/8 to its lowest terms.
  • 5.Reduce the fraction 6/8.
  • 6.2/4 is the same as which fraction?
Three of the six ask something already asked. Note that none of them share wording with their twin — matching the text would have caught none of these.

The other two tools

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