News

Follow the development of Smart Revise

Huge quality of life update for both students and teachers

Live from Saturday 29th March, lots of different parts of the product have had some magic dust sprinkled on them in this update.

Question filters in Quiz and Advance for students

Paving the way for the next big feature, “Goals” are some new question filters for students to use in Quiz and Advance mode. Just above the question students will now see, “Filters” with the option to exclude mastered questions or focus on incorrectly answered questions only.

In Advance, students can choose to see easy, medium or hard questions.

Smart mode will select the next question for the student based on their data. This is still the best option for everyday spaced and interleaved learning, but the increased flexibility of filters will reduce the frustration that some students experience when the algorithms are in control!

Delete and add questions from a task for teachers

Teachers now have the option to delete and add individual questions when setting a task. Swapping one question for another has always been possible, but this new feature allows teachers to do so much more. Even manually creating a task by choosing every question you want. This is just the first iteration towards an even better interface allowing you to search and prioritise questions for selection. As a quick hack, remember that CTRL-F will allow you to “find in page” on most browsers. So, if you want to find a question about sorting, try finding “sort” for example. Just remember you will need to have selected the relevant topics to see these questions.

Improved AI marking messages for teachers

Before this update Tasks that included questions that could not be marked by AI (no robot icon) reported that marking was complete once AI had finished doing what it could. Now, if your task does include questions that are not markable by AI, or it trips up during the marking process, it will report, “AI Complete (you to mark)”. A teacher, the student or a peer can then complete the marking for those remaining questions.

Please do bear in mind that AI marking is not 100% accurate. That’s one reason why Ofqual have said that exam boards cannot use AI marking for real examinations. It is getting better all the time, but it is unrealistic to expect it to be perfect. Unlike classic algorithms that are deterministic, AI algorithms are probabilistic. They also hallucinate and the content at GCSE and A level is often abstracted for the level of study, so this is an added complication too.

Tab navigation on desktop

Using tab on the keyboard will now navigate sensibly around the page. We still recommend you use a mouse or touch wherever possible, but this is a useful accessibility option.

Bug fix: difference in data between CSV & analytics reports on-screen

Due to rounding errors sometimes the downloadable data from the analytics reports was different to what could be downloaded as a CSV file. This has now been corrected so that the data is consistent no matter how you choose to view it.

Exploit fix: students can no longer assign negative marks to an answer

If you want to fully test your product, put it into the hands of your students. They always seem to find something that we just hadn’t thought of! It transpires that by manipulating the client-side code students were able to input negative numbers into the “mark” box, giving themselves (or a peer) a negative mark for a question. We have now patched this with more server-side validation.

Rebranding

If you haven’t already noticed we’ve got a brand-new main Craig'n'Dave website. We are slowly migrating all our resources to this new look, and that includes Smart Revise. Nothing major here. A new image on the landing page and each page header but it helps to tie all our products together.

Feature requests

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Archives

Improvements to task marking

Improvements to task marking

Automatically release marks to students after AI marking plus an improved teacher marking interface too.
Flight path

What does the data on a student flight path mean?

Flight paths show progress over time, but how is this calculated?
Topic filters

What’s the difference between the topic filters?

Use the different topic filters at each stage of the course.
Recap the entire course to date with Quiz.

Why using Quiz is better than Tasks for recall activities

With Tasks all students get the same questions, but with Quiz the questions are automatically personalised for each student.
Book cover: The Revision Revolution by Helen Howell and Ross Morrison McGill.

Why you should start every computer science lesson in years 10 to 13 with Smart Revise Quiz

Starting every lesson with a recall activity has a lasting impact over time.
Student practicing exams

AQA A level content update

Another huge update for the AQA A level Computer Science course includes a bumper load of new, original Advance questions.
Teacher working on laptop

Task management update

Managing Tasks is now much easier with a redesigned interface to increase data visibility.
Case studies

New case studies for AQA & OCR Business

11 new case studies have been added to the OCR GCSE (J204) and AQA GCSE (8132) Business courses.
Student piloting an aeroplane

New feature: student flight path

With the introduction of flight paths, students and teachers can now see progress over time.

Improved Edexcel 1CP2 Computer Science course

For September 2024, every Quiz question and Term definition has been reviewed and replaced or reworded to ensure a tighter match to the course specification.
Teach Co Awards 2024 logo

Shortlisted in the Teach Secondary Awards 2024

We are proud to announce that Smart Revise has been shortlisted for the third year in a row for a teaching award.
Teacher photocopying sheets

Copy a task between year groups

Tasks can now be copied across year groups within the same course family.
Teenager sat on bed with an iPad.

June 2024 update

A new Terms analytics report and other changes.
Student surrounded by books

AQA A/AS level Computer Science update

The new 2026 AQA (7517) course has been broken down from 13 topics into 51 sub-topics, but AS level has been discontinued.
Student with a tablet computer looking at a pie chart.

Topic targeting

Students can now focus on one topic at a time more easily using links in their revision report.
A robot looking at blocks that make a bar chart.

Data from Tasks is now included in Quiz, Terms & Advance

Tasks that have marks released to students will now affect Quiz, Terms, Advance and Analytics too.

Huge improvement to AI marking

The large language model has been upgraded to improve the range and accuracy of AI marking.

Content update for GCSE Computer Science courses

New programming questions have been added matching the format of real exams.

2023 release notes

All the features released in 2023.

2022 release notes

All the features released in 2022.

2021 release notes

All the features released in 2021.