Read and practise

For students

Alongside chat, two further facilities: reading material with assistance available on any passage, and practising against questions drawn from that same material.

The reader

Course documents open in Alexandria’s reader, retaining the layout the educator produced.

Any selection, whether text or a figure, can be queried. The question is anchored to the selection, so the passage in question need not be described. A promising answer can be continued in full chat with the document still in scope.

This differs from pasting a passage into a general chatbot: the reader already holds the document, the page, and the preceding context.

Notebooks

Jupyter notebooks (.ipynb) open cell by cell. Where a course contains a bundle of notebooks, they can be navigated as a tree and searched either collectively or individually.

Practice

Practice draws its questions from the course material, both multiple choice and open-ended, so that assessment reflects what was taught.

Ways in

The practice tab lists the exercises already prepared for the course, and offers four ways to start something new:

Entry	What it does
Generate new questions	Writes fresh questions from the course material
Practice a specific file	Pick one file and work up to ten questions on it
Create mock exam	A twelve-question set mixing all the course topics
Describe & Practice	Describe what you want to practise and get matching exercises

All four open the same full-page runner. A mock exam is not a separate mode: it is a longer set, twelve questions spread across the course topics, sat in the runner every other exercise uses. Its questions are also added to the exercise list afterwards, grouped by topic and marked ai generated in the Source column, so a single mock exam appears there as several exercises rather than one.

Feedback is immediate and cites sources, so an incorrect answer identifies the passage that explains it. Questions may be asked during a practice session without leaving it.

A practice exercise headed Secants and Tangents, marked Imported from Problem Set 1.pdf, with sub-question 1a asking for values of the secant slope, a typed answer in the box below it, and a Feedback panel underneath explaining which values were expected, why the submitted ones were wrong, and carrying a numbered citation chip back to the source — An answered practice question. Feedback names the expected values, explains the error, and cites the material it drew on.

Checking what the feedback was built on

Feedback carries numbered citation chips in the same way a chat answer does. Selecting one opens a Sources panel down the right-hand side listing every passage the assessment drew on, each with its document and page, a Copy control, and Open source in document to go to the passage itself in the reader.

This matters more in practice than in chat. Where feedback says an answer is incomplete, the panel shows the material it was judged against, so a disputed correction can be settled against the source rather than accepted on trust.

A practice question on eutectic freeze crystallization with its Feedback panel on the left and a Sources panel open down the right-hand side, listing four numbered sources from Master_thesis.pdf with their page numbers, each followed by the passage text and Copy and Open source in document controls — Selecting a citation chip in feedback opens the Sources panel, with the page each passage came from.

Asking while you work

Ask Alexandria, at the foot of the runner, opens a chat panel beside the questions without leaving the set. It arrives scoped to the exercise in front of you and offers openers such as Give me a quick refresher on this topic, so a question need not be composed from nothing.

Answers here behave as they do in chat: built from the course material, stating how many sources they used, citing individual claims, and occasionally including an interactive panel where a concept turns on a changing quantity.

The practice runner with an Ask Alexandria panel open on the right, headed 'What's the core concept behind this question?', its answer generated from the course material with 10 sources and inline citation chips explaining secant slope, tangent slope and the limit, and an embedded interactive Secant to Tangent Limit visualisation reading delta x 2.00, secant slope 2.00 and tangent slope 1.00 above a plotted curve with its secant and tangent lines — The Ask Alexandria panel beside a question. The set stays open on the left.

Questions taken from real papers

Not every question is written for the platform. Where an educator has uploaded an exam or problem set, its exercises are extracted and appear in Practice as they were set, sub-parts and labels intact. These carry an Imported from line naming the file they came from; a question without that line was generated from the material rather than sat by anyone.

The distinction is worth noticing. An imported exercise is past assessment and indicates the form and difficulty of the real thing. A generated one covers the material but does not evidence how it has been examined.

Finishing a set

Once every question in the set has been answered, the end of the page acknowledges it and offers a way back to the course. There is no score or percentage: practice is not marked, and the feedback under each individual question is the record of how it went.

The end of a practice session: the last question's Feedback panel with thumbs up and thumbs down, Copy and Retry controls, and below the page a green checkmark with the message 'Great work, you're done!' and a Return to Course link — The end of a completed set. Practice is not scored, so each question's own feedback is the record.

Activity

Activity, beside Exercises in the practice tab, summarises your own practice across the course. It covers your work only. It is not the educator’s view of the class, which lives on the separate activity tab.

Four panels:

Panel	What it reports
Topic Coverage	How many of the course topics you have attempted once, and how many you have attempted ten times or more
Total Attempts	Every answer you have submitted in the course
Attempts Over Time	Those attempts plotted by date
Performance	The topics behind your last ten attempts, each with the number of attempts you made on it

Until you have practised, it reports that no practice data is available yet.

The practice Activity view showing four panels: Topic Coverage with a ring chart reading 1 of 10 topics covered once and 0 of 10 covered over 10 times, Total Attempts reading 4 attempts, an Attempts Over Time bar chart for August 1 2026, and Performance based on your last 10 attempts listing the topic Eutectic Freeze Crystallization with 1 attempt — The Activity view after a short session. Coverage, total attempts, attempts by date, and the topics behind recent work.

Explore

Searches a course or the whole library by meaning rather than exact wording, which is useful where a concept is recalled but the term used for it is not.

Ask your course a question