How to Create Practice Exercises With AI From Your Own Notes

Practice exercises with AI use the same source material as a quiz — your notes, a lecture PDF, a set of slides — but instead of picking the right option from four choices, you get an open-ended task: explain a concept, work through a problem, or answer a question in your own words. A model solution only appears after you've tried, so you check your own reasoning instead of recognizing the right answer among distractors.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. Multiple-choice tests recognition — can you spot the right answer when it's in front of you? Open-ended practice tests recall — can you produce the answer from nothing? Most exams, and most real work, demand the second kind.

1. Upload the notes, slides, or PDF you want to practice from, or add a link, and wait for it to be indexed.
2. Select it as a source, or leave the whole project selected for exercises that draw on everything in it.
3. Ask the tool to generate practice exercises instead of a quiz.
4. Work through each task on your own before revealing the solution — the point is producing an answer, not skipping straight to it.
5. Compare your answer to the model solution, then move to the next exercise or generate a fresh set from the same sources.

Re-reading a chapter or re-watching a lecture feels productive, but it mostly tests recognition — the material looks familiar, so it feels learned. Producing an answer from a blank page is a harder, more honest test, and it's the skill most exams and real tasks actually require. Because each exercise is grounded in the source you uploaded rather than generic trivia, the gap between your attempt and the model solution shows you exactly where your understanding is thin — the same grounding principle behind retrieval-augmented generation.

Quizzes and practice exercises test the same material two different ways. A multiple-choice quiz is fast and tells you where you're confident; open-ended exercises are slower and tell you whether you can actually explain it. Running both on the same sources — the same way you'd study with AI from your own notes — covers recognition and recall in one session instead of leaving a gap you only discover on exam day.

Doxy's quiz and practice exercise tools generate both from whatever you upload — PDFs, slides, notes, or a Word or PowerPoint file — available on Pro and Business plans. Upload your material, run document Q&A to check the details, then switch to practice exercises to test whether you can produce the answer yourself.