Everything for one subject, in one place
Notes, flashcards, practice questions and past papers stop being four separate piles. YourSubjects keeps them together, so revising is a matter of opening the subject rather than assembling it first.
Free · No install · Works without an account
The problem it solves
Most people's revision material is scattered across a notebook, a folder of PDFs, a flashcard app, and a pile of past papers that live in a drawer. Each of those is fine on its own. The trouble is the gaps between them: the notes never turn into questions, the questions never get harder in the places you keep getting wrong, and the past papers get sat once, marked, and never looked at again.
The methods that research consistently supports — testing yourself rather than re-reading, spacing the tests out, mixing topics up — all depend on that material being connected. You can't quiz yourself on a topic you never turned into questions. You can't space anything if you don't know what you covered when. Most of the effort in studying well goes into the plumbing, not the studying.
YourSubjects is the plumbing. A subject holds its own notes, its own cards, its own question bank and its own papers, and knows what you've read, learned and got wrong. Everything below follows from that.
What's in a subject
Notes
Write in sections, with headings, tables, images, diagrams and graphs. Read-only by default and editable when you flip into edit mode, so revising a subject can't accidentally rewrite it.
Flashcards
Plain front-and-back cards, reviewed one at a time, with the ones you've learned tracked separately from the ones you haven't. Good cards are a skill — we wrote a guide on it.
Practice questions
Multiple choice, true/false and short answer, each with an explanation and a difficulty. Marking ignores capitals, spacing and punctuation, and compares numbers as numbers, so a right answer typed differently still counts.
Papers
Build a full exam paper with marks and a recommended time, sit it against a timer, and get it marked. Long-answer questions you mark yourself. Every sitting is kept, so you can see which topics keep costing you marks.
Files
Upload PDFs, documents and images — a syllabus, a textbook chapter, a marked script — and annotate over the page. Annotations are saved with the subject rather than the file.
Mindmap
A map of the subject that you write yourself. Nothing is generated from your notes and quietly added to it; laying out and scaling the map is automatic, deciding what's on it is not.
Guides to studying properly
Software doesn't make anyone study well. Method does. These are plain-English write-ups of the techniques that have held up in the research literature, with the awkward parts left in — what each one costs, where it fails, and what to do when you have three days rather than three months.
Retrieval practice: why testing beats re-reading
Pulling something out of your head strengthens it more than putting it in again. The single highest-return change most people can make.
How spaced repetition actually works
Why forgetting a little between reviews is the point, how to space them without an algorithm, and when spacing is the wrong tool.
The illusion of fluency
Why highlighting and re-reading feel productive and aren't, and how to tell the difference between recognising a fact and knowing it.
Writing flashcards that don't waste your time
Most bad revision is bad cards. What to put on one, what to leave off, and the specific mistakes that make a deck unlearnable.
How to use past papers properly
Sitting a paper is a fifth of the value. The other four fifths are in what you do with the marked script afterwards.
Interleaving vs. blocked practice
Doing thirty of the same question type feels like mastery. Mixing them up feels worse and works better. Why, and how far to take it.
A revision timetable that survives
Why the colour-coded hour-by-hour plan collapses in week one, and what to build instead.
Elaboration: asking why until it sticks
The technique that turns a list of facts into something you can reason from — and the one that works best on subjects you find dull.
Note-taking you'll actually reuse
Notes are usually written once and read never. Writing them as future questions fixes that.
The last week, and the exam itself
What's worth doing in the final days, what isn't, and how to spend the first five minutes of a paper.
Accounts, data and cost
You can use YourSubjects without an account. Do that and everything stays in your own browser's storage on that one device — nothing is sent anywhere, and clearing your browser data clears your subjects with it. Making an account moves your work onto the server so it follows you between devices, and offers to bring your local subjects with it.
It's free. It is run as a personal project rather than a business, so there is no paid tier, no trial, and no upsell inside the app. The guides on this site carry advertising; the app itself carries none, and it never will — an exam you're sitting is not a place for a banner.