Generating Practice Exams

Learn how to create exams in acemate

Generate personalized practice exams tailored to your course content, knowledge level, and study needs. Choose topics, question types, and difficulty to create the perfect practice test for your exam preparation.

How to Generate a Practice Exam


Step 1: Access the Exam Generator

You can access the Exam Generator in multiple ways

  • From Quick actions and clicking on Generate Exam

  • Hover on the Exams button on the sidebar and click on the + button

  • Click on the Exam button on the sidebar opens the Exams overview

  • When a document is opened, clicking on Practice at the top of the toolbar.

Step 2: Select Lectures / Topics

You'll see a list of topics from your uploaded materials:

  • Select specific lectures you want to practice.

  • You can even select individual topics from each lecture.

  • Select all lectures for comprehensive review

Tips for Topic Selection:

  • Focus on topics you find difficult

  • Include topics that will be on the real exam

  • Mix easy and hard topics for balanced practice

  • Review your Mind Maps to identify weak areas (see @What are mind maps)

Step 3: Choose Exam Type

Exam type selection dialog


Select from the template or configure your own practice test.

  1. Quick Quiz

  2. Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ)

  3. Progressive Practice:

    • For mastering complex topics.

    • The test scales in difficulty

    • Best for: Explanations, problem-solving, analysis

  4. Deep Dive:

    • For final exam prep and testing critical thinking

    • Test application of knowledge

    • Best for: Advanced topics, real-world applications

Configure Your Own

If the pre-made templates don't fit your needs, you can select "Configure your own exam" to manually build your test structure.

The Exam Creator Tool

This tool allows you to build an exam section-by-section. For each section, you can control:

  • Type of Questions: Force a specific format (e.g., set Section 1 to Multiple Choice and Section 2 to Open Ended).

  • Number of Questions: Set the exact number of questions (e.g., 50 questions for a long session).

  • Relevant documents: Choose specific lectures for specific sections (e.g., "Lecture 1 only" for the first 10 questions).

Additional options

Clicking the "Additional options" dropdown allows for deeper customization:

  • Number of Answer Options: For multiple-choice questions, you can control how many choices are presented (e.g., increase from 4 to 5 to make guessing harder).

  • Difficulty: specific difficulty level for the section (e.g., Easy, Hard, Impossible or Default).

  • Learning Taxonomy Level: Adjust the cognitive complexity of the questions (set to "Standard" by default) to target different levels of thinking (e.g., recall vs. analysis).

  • Additional Instructions: A free-text field where you can add specific constraints or requests for the AI, such as "use inclusive language" or "focus on definitions".

Tip: You can create a multi-part exam by clicking "Add a section" at the bottom. This allows you to mix different question types (e.g., Section 1: Multiple Choice, Section 2: Essay) into a single test.

Visual Content

For all exam types, you can check the box "Include potential images from your documents".

  • What this does: If your uploaded notes contain diagrams, charts, or graphs, the system will generate questions asking you to identify or interpret these visual elements.

Step 6: Generate the Exam

  • Review your selections

  • Click " ✨ Start Generation"

  • Wait for acemate to generate questions (usually 1-3 minutes)

Tips for Effective Exam Generation

Start Early:

  • Generate practice exams throughout the semester

  • Don't wait until the week before the exam

  • Regular practice is more effective than cramming

Vary Your Practice:

  • Generate different types of exams

  • Mix easy and hard difficulty

  • Try different topic combinations

Use Your Performance Data:

  • Check your previous exam results

  • Focus on topics where you scored low

  • Generate exams targeting weak areas

Match Real Exam Conditions:

  • If your real exam is mostly MCQ, generate MCQ exams

  • If it's mostly free text, practice free text

  • Match the format you'll actually face

Pro vs Free Plan Differences

Free Plan:

  • ✅ Can generate practice exams

  • ✅ All question types available

  • ❌ Limited number of exams per week/month

  • ❌ May have restrictions on exam length

Pro Plan:

  • ✅ Unlimited exam generation

  • ✅ All question types available

  • ✅ No restrictions on exam length

  • ✅ Priority processing

Upgrade to Pro if:

  • You need many practice exams

  • You're preparing for multiple exams

  • You want unlimited practice opportunities

After Generation

Once your exam is generated:

  • It appears in your Exams list

  • You can start taking it immediately

  • Or save it for later

  • You can generate multiple exams and take them when ready

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