The Learning App for Gradate School

Quizkly (Quickly with a ‘z’) is a project that I’ve decided to pursue this year alongside a friend I met via Pear Garage. He initially struck me as brilliant and intense, and it didn’t take long after I saw the demo to decide this was worth pursuing. Together, we are building a machine learning application to auto-generate multiple choice quizzes from any corpus of text. Remember the days when you had to open up to the pages of a textbook and manually create flashcards to test yourself with? One of your flashcards might have been, “DNA” (front) and “A molecule composed of two chains that coil around each other to form a double helix carrying the genetic instructions used in growth, development, functioning, and reproduction of all known living organisms and viruses” (back). Then perhaps you asked a friend to test you for tomorrow’s biology quiz, and thirty minutes of gossip later, you two have barely gotten past “viruses.” 

Now, granted, Quizlet has already been mass-adopted for K to 12, and have built strong defensibility in the user engagement they’ve had and the accumulation of content, but suppose you are a graduate student who were given dozens of pages of readings to do for an upcoming test. Since you don’t have time to read all of it, you may try to substitute it with multiple sets, but then a lot of the material is repeated, and you are constantly gnawing at the thought it may not cover everything. Worse, you wonder, “Is there a better way I can study? Is this even efficient?” You may instead create your own set by skimming the readings and looking for key words, but that just feels like reinventing the wheel, and it feels to tedious.

From talking to graduate students right at Stanford, I can’t stress how much of a pain this is to graduate students – forever trying to make their routines more efficient and minimize the time they have to spend being a robot everyday.

This is where the idea for Quizkly begins, because we think it is utterly ridiculous how professional school students worldwide have to waste time doing actions that really aren’t worth their cognitive energy for!

What if, instead of the scenario described above, you can just do this.

Larry Page and Peter Thiel has been quoted to say innovation is finding a 10x improvement in some meaningful dimension of a system. For Quizkly, the dimension we focus on is time, students’ most precious resource. I believe Quizkly creates an entirely new way to do Quizlet, because it reduces the time of the manual process of translating and writing a set of flashcards to the time it takes to fetch an API call. I believe, should we execute this well, Quizkly will compound on a fundamentally different curve than Quizlet.

With that said (and not more), the beta will be out soon; for now, check out our landing page. Check back to this blog to be amongst the first testers!