Ace
Disclosure: we make Ace. ChatGPT details below come from OpenAI's own announcements as of October 26, 2026; features change, so check there too. ChatGPT is a trademark of OpenAI; Ace is not affiliated with it.
Short answer: ChatGPT is a general assistant: great for explaining a concept you're stuck on, weak as your main way to revise. A chat doesn't keep a set of questions you return to, doesn't stick to your lecturer's material unless you keep reminding it, and can state wrong answers fluently. Ace is built for one job: turning your own slides, PDFs and lecture videos into practice questions, checking every answer against your file and showing the sentence it came from.
What goes wrong when you revise in a chat?
Most students start the same way: paste in a chapter, ask for a summary, read it and feel ready. It feels productive because the material suddenly looks simple. But reading a summary is recognition, not recall, and exams ask for recall.
Even when you ask ChatGPT to quiz you, a chat has three habits that work against revision:
- It wanders off your syllabus. Ask about "the Krebs cycle" and you get the internet's version, not necessarily your lecturer's. Unless you paste your notes in and say "only use these", it fills gaps with general knowledge.
- It can be confidently wrong. Language models write fluent, plausible sentences, including false ones. If you don't already know the answer, you can't tell which is which, and that's exactly the situation you're in while revising.
- It doesn't keep a deck. Yesterday's questions sit somewhere up the scroll. Coming back to the ones you missed, a few days later, is up to you.
OpenAI has added a study mode that asks questions and gives hints instead of handing over answers, which helps with the first habit of just reading answers. It is still a conversation, though, not a set of questions tied to your file.
What does the research say?
The most useful study so far is a field experiment with nearly a thousand high-school maths students (Bastani and colleagues, 2025). Students who practised with a standard ChatGPT-style assistant did much better on the practice problems while they had it. When it was taken away, they did worse on the exam than students who had never had it, by 17%. The authors put it down to students using it as a crutch. A version designed to give hints rather than answers largely avoided that harm.
That fits decades of work on retrieval practice. Roediger and Karpicke (2006) found that students who practised recalling a passage remembered far more of it a week later than students who spent the same time rereading it, even though the rereaders felt more confident. Being tested is the learning; reading a good explanation mostly isn't.
So the question isn't "AI or no AI". It's whether the tool makes you retrieve the answer yourself, on the material you'll actually be examined on.
Where is Ace different from ChatGPT?
| Ace | |
|---|---|
| Where questions come from | Only the file you upload: PDF, PowerPoint, Word, ePub, text or a YouTube lecture link |
| Checking answers | Every answer is checked against your file; questions that fail the check are dropped before you see them |
| Proof | Under each answer, the sentence from your own material that backs it |
| Question types | Multiple choice, put the steps in order, type the answer, label a diagram taken from your own slides, and simulations for formula topics |
| Scope | Pick the chapters you're being examined on |
| Coming back to it | Your study sets stay in your library, with streaks and a study calendar |
| Studying with someone | Live two-player duels on the same questions, taking turns against a clock |
The biggest difference is trust. When a question in Ace says the answer is "a separate condenser", the line from your lecture that says so is right there under it. You never have to wonder whether the answer came from your course or from somewhere else. See how Ace writes and checks questions.
The second is format. A chat is text in, text out. Putting the stages of mitosis in order by dragging them, or labelling a diagram lifted from your own slides, practises the kind of recall exams actually ask for. Which types you get depends on what your material contains.
Can you use ChatGPT and Ace together?
Yes, and that's how they fit best:
- Practise first. Upload the lecture to Ace and answer its questions from memory.
- Read the source line on every miss. Often that's enough to fix it.
- Use ChatGPT for the stubborn ones. If a concept still doesn't click, ask it to explain, and check the explanation against your notes. Our guide to checking AI study answers shows how.
- Come back to the set later. A few days on, play it again or duel a friend on it. Spacing beats one long session; see our spaced repetition schedule.
If you want to stay in ChatGPT, our guide to getting ChatGPT to quiz you has prompts that keep it on your notes. Or try Ace with your own lecture: your first study set is free.
Frequently asked questions
Is ChatGPT good for studying?
For explanations, yes. As your main revision method, it's weak on its own: it doesn't keep a set of questions you return to, it drifts beyond your course unless told not to, and it can be confidently wrong. Use it alongside practice from your own material.
Does ChatGPT study mode fix this?
It helps with one part: it asks questions and gives hints instead of handing over answers. It's still a conversation rather than a checked set of questions built from your file, so checking answers and coming back to misses is still on you.
How does Ace stop wrong answers?
Every question is written only from the file you upload, and every answer is checked against it. Questions that fail the check are dropped, and the backing sentence from your file is shown under each answer.
Is Ace a tutor like ChatGPT?
No. Ace doesn't teach or explain lectures; your material does that. Ace turns it into practice and shows you where each answer comes from.
Sources
- Bastani, H., Bastani, O., Sungu, A., Ge, H., Kabakçı, Ö. & Mariman, R. (2025). Generative AI without guardrails can harm learning: Evidence from high school mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(26), e2422633122. Record
- Roediger, H. L. & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255. PDF
- OpenAI (2025). Introducing study mode in ChatGPT. openai.com
