Your own study dashboard

The problem it solves

Ask a student halfway through revision how many Physics papers they have done and most cannot tell you. Not because they have not worked — because the evidence is scattered. Some marks are in a notebook, some in a spreadsheet that stopped being updated in week two, some only in memory. A few papers have been done twice by accident; others have been meant-to-do for a month.

Revision goes wrong in a particular way when you cannot see it. You end up redoing the subject you enjoy, avoiding the one you are weakest at, and discovering in the mock that the balance was wrong. The work was there. The picture of the work was not.

The dashboard exists to hold that picture for you, so the decision about what to study today is made from what you have actually done rather than what you can remember doing.

When nobody is setting the pace

A good share of the students using this site are, in the way that matters, studying alone. Some are private candidates entered through a centre they only see on exam day. Some are at schools that teach the subject but not the paper — the content gets covered, the exam technique does not. Some are re-sitting one unit while the rest of their life has moved on. Some are taking a subject their school does not offer at all.

None of that makes the exam easier, and none of it changes what is on the paper. What changes is that the scaffolding is gone. In a well-run class somebody decides what you practise this week, notices when you have gone quiet on a topic, marks your work without flattering you, and tells you whether you are on course. Studying by yourself, those jobs do not disappear. They become yours.

The four jobs you have taken on

It is worth naming them, because students who study alone usually do the first one well and the other three badly — not through laziness, but because nobody has ever told them those jobs existed.

• Deciding what to do next. Left to instinct, almost everyone practises the subject they are best at. It feels productive because it goes well. The subject you avoid is the one quietly deciding your results.
• Marking yourself honestly. The hardest of the four. It is very easy to read a mark scheme, recognise the idea, and award yourself the mark for having nearly thought of it. An examiner will not. The discipline is to mark what you wrote, not what you meant.
• Noticing a pattern. One bad paper tells you nothing. Four papers where you lose the same marks on the same kind of question tells you exactly what to fix — but only if you can still see all four.
• Judging whether you are ready. Without a teacher, this collapses into a feeling, and the feeling is usually wrong in whichever direction your temperament leans.

The dashboard is not a replacement for a teacher and it would be dishonest to sell it as one. What it does is hold the record those four jobs depend on, so they are decisions about evidence rather than about mood.

What it gives you

• Everything in one view. Your subjects, your exam dates and your progress on one screen, instead of across three apps and a notebook.
• An honest record. Mark each paper as done, star the ones worth another go, and put in your score. Over a few weeks that becomes a picture of how you are really doing — not how you feel you are doing.
• Where you stand against your target. Tell it the grade you are aiming for and it keeps the gap in front of you, subject by subject.
• A plan for today. Rather than facing a list of two thousand papers, you get the handful that make sense next, chosen around your exam dates.
• Your exams on a calendar. With a countdown, so a date in June stops being abstract in March.
• Somewhere to keep notes. Written or photographed, attached to the subject they belong to.
• A focus timer and a streak. Small things, but they are what turn revision from an intention into a habit.

Knowing whether you are ready

This is the question self-taught students ask most and answer worst. With no class to compare yourself against, “am I ready?” turns into a mood. Anxious students conclude they are nowhere near when they are fine. Confident ones conclude they are fine when they have done four papers, all from the same two years, all of them open-book.

There is a better answer, and it is unglamorous: look at whether your marks have stopped moving. Scores on fresh papers, under something like exam conditions, climb steeply at first as you stop losing marks to carelessness and misread questions. Then they flatten. A flat line near your target is readiness. A flat line well below it means the method needs changing — more papers at the same approach will not move it, and that is the single most useful thing a record of your own marks can tell you.

It is also why the score matters more than the tick. Ticking a paper off records that you did it. The mark records whether it worked.

Why we built it rather than recommending a planner app

There is no shortage of study apps. What none of them know is which Edexcel papers exist, which ones you have already sat, or what a mark of 90 out of 150 means in the session that paper came from. A general planner can hold a to-do list; it cannot tell you that you have done every Mechanics paper since 2021 and none at all for Statistics.

Because this dashboard sits on top of the paper library, it knows both halves — what you have done, and what still exists to be done. That is the difference between a list and a plan.

What it costs

Nothing. Subjects, exam dates, paper tracking, scores, the planner, the countdown, the focus timer and your notes are all free, and signing up takes about twenty seconds with a Google account or an email address.

There is a paid tier for students who want more — it adds tools that cost us money to run — but nothing listed above sits behind it, and nothing you have already set up ever stops working. What Premium adds, if you are curious.

Your data

What you record is yours and private to your account. Notes are visible only to you unless you deliberately choose to share one. There are no advertisements anywhere inside the dashboard — a page only one person can see is no place for them. You can delete your account, and everything in it, whenever you like; see the privacy policy for exactly what is stored.

Getting started

Sign in, add the subjects you are taking and the sitting you are entered for, and the rest fills in as you work. There is nothing to set up first and nothing to import. If you have already done twenty papers, tick them off in a couple of minutes and the picture is immediately accurate.