How to Use ChatGPT to Create Powerful Study Guides

I’m going to show you how you can use ChatGPT to create powerful study guides FAST. With the power of ChatGPT you can seriously speed up the process of creating a study guide so you can spend more time actually studying instead of creating a study guide.

In this guide, I will show you how to use ChatGPT to create effective study guides that can help you ace your exams. By the end of this guide, you will have a solid understanding of how to leverage ChatGPT’s capabilities to create comprehensive and well-organized study guides that can help you achieve your academic goals.

Let’s get into how you can use ChatGPT to create powerful study guides.

Table of Contents

Sources to Use When Creating a Chatgpt Study Guide

These are just some ideas for what you can feed into ChatGPT to generate guides in the different formats. In general, though you are going to want to look for sources that give a broad overview of what you need to study. Here are some ideas to get you started below.

Textbook table of contents: This is the most reliable source for an outline, and why it’s at the top of this list.
Course Syllabus: Your course syllabus will likely have an outline of the course material and what is going to be studied. This is a great source because is highly likely that the information there will be very similar to what your exam will contain.
Previous tests: This is yet another source that is highly relevant to what you are going to be studying for, the trouble with these is finding them, depending on the subject, etc.
Your Notes: The quality of this is largely determined by how good your notes are, and most people don’t know what good notes are. If you think your notes are good, then try your hand at using them.

However, it’s also important that when you create your study guide, you need to personalize and prioritize the information to exactly what you need.

Filter down the sources

Often, if you are planning on using a study guide to study for an exam or test, you are going to want to filter down the information.

This is because not all information is created equal. There will be some material that you spend hours going over. But other parts, such as the first few chapters, will need much less attention.

I have a process for this prioritization, of finding what’s called “high-yield information”. If you want an in-depth guide into how you can effectively filter down information, check out my article on cramming for an exam in 24 hours. In that article, I describe my exact process for finding the most important information.

Different Study Guide Formats That Work Well With ChatGPT

Once, you filter down the information you need, cut out the least important sections from the syllabus, textbook, or whatever your source is.

There are a few different formats in that you can create study guides. These are all effective and have their own pros and cons, but some are more suited to ChatGPT’s formatting than others.

Summary sheet of what you need to study
Table of similarities and differences
Concept map

I’m going to go into a bit more depth on how you can create each of these formats.

How to Use Chatgpt to Create Powerful Study Guides

1. Create A Summary Sheet of What You Need to Study

I found a syllabus for AP Biology online as an example. Here’s the result and the prompt I used to turn it into a high-quality study guide.

The whole guide can’t fit into a single screenshot, but you get the idea.

Promt:

I want you to pretend to be an experienced student with 20 years of studying experience. Based on this syllabus, create a study guide that includes the most actionable and important information.

There is also another version of this study guide generator I created that is in a table format. This makes the study guide more readable and actionable.

Promt:

I want you to pretend to be an experienced student with 20 years of studying experience. Based on this syllabus, create a study guide in a table format that includes the most actionable and important information.

That’s how you can create a study guide using ChatGPT that gives a broader overview of the material in text form. However, you can also create a study guide in a visual mindmap form.

2. Create a mind map

This is probably the study guide strategy I use the most for a broad overview. You can do this using ChatGPT as well. However, doing this well is something that can never really be automated, because making a mind map is where the learning happens.

However, you can automate and improve on certain aspects of the mind map creation process using ChatGPT. I have an entire article on how you can use ChatGPT to create a mindmap. All you need to do is use the sources mentioned at the start of this article as the sources for your mindmap.

3. Table of similarities and differences

If you want to zoom into a particular area of the course, creating a table of similarities and differences can be quite helpful. For instance, if you are studying history, knowing the differences between the American and French revolutions would be very helpful.

Here are the results I got and the prompt I used.

Prompt:
I want you to pretend to be an experienced student with 20 years of studying experience. Create a Table of Similarities and Differences between [Your Topic]. The table with have topics listed in a column followed by columns for various pieces of information that relates or differs from each.

In reality, you will only need to use this technique for a select few topics within a course. As a general rule of thumb, It’s probably not worth your time to make more than 3 of these.

Turn Your ChatGPT Study Guide Into a Study Plan

The last step is to make this study guide even more actionable. This involves using ChatGPT to synthesize your study guide into a schedule that breaks down what you need to study each day.

Sidenote: This probably wont work too well with the mind mapping approach, its best to use the summary examples I provided in either text or table form.

Here are the results and prompt for creating a 3-week study plan. You can change this to any time span you wish. Also, keep in mind that the notes that it suggests might not be realistic, take those with a grain of salt.

Promt:

Turn this study guide into a 3 week study plan in a table format with each day planned out

At this point, you are pretty much done! The last step is really to take this plan outside of ChatGPT and into something where you can track your progress.

Put The Study Plan Into Your Calendar (Optional)

Lastly, this is the most tedious step.

You can either screenshot the plan and just follow along with what week you are on, striking out each subject along the way, or you can manually enter these things into google calendar or whatever calendar system you have.

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Sean

Hello, my name is Sean and I am currently a Cognitive Science student at a Canadian University. My passion for learning has led me to research the ways in which we can optimize our learning as students. I believe that learning should be an enjoyable and fulfilling experience. I am constantly seeking out new ways to make the most out of my learning at university and I write about those things here.