How to actually revise from a textbook with ChatGPT

The mistake almost everyone makes

Upload a chapter, ask for a summary, read the summary, feel prepared.

The problem is that reading something you understand is not the same as being able to recall it. A good summary is easy to follow, which makes it feel like learning while asking almost nothing of you.

The fix is to make it ask rather than tell.

Ask to be tested

I am revising this chapter. Ask me one question at a time. Wait for my answer before asking the next. After each answer, tell me whether I was right, and if not, explain what I missed using the chapter's own explanation.

Start with the basics and get harder. Do not give me the answers up front.

The "one at a time, wait for my answer" part matters. Without it you get ten questions and their answers in one block, which is another thing to read rather than a test.

Other things worth asking for

Explain it three ways.

Explain [concept] three times: once in one sentence, once as you would to someone who has never studied this, and once technically using the chapter's terminology.

Different explanations catch different confusions, and the gap between the simple and technical version is often exactly where your understanding is thin.

Find what connects.

How does this chapter connect to [previous chapter]? What does it assume I already understand?

Textbooks build, and the reason chapter seven is hard is usually chapter five.

Predict the exam.

Based on this chapter, what would an exam question look like? Give me three: one recall, one application, one that requires combining two ideas from the chapter.

Attack your own answer.

Here is my answer to [question]. Mark it strictly and tell me what a top answer would add.

Getting a textbook in

The practical obstacles, in the order you will hit them.

If it is a scan or photographs of pages, there is no text to read. OCR it first. This includes phone photos of a page, which are the most common version of this problem.

If it is a long chapter, it may pass 2 million tokens and be truncated silently. Check by asking what the last section of the chapter covers. If it cannot say, you are revising from the first half.

Work one chapter at a time regardless. A whole textbook at once gets you shallow answers about everything rather than useful ones about the thing you are studying tonight.

Match your course, not just the book

Textbooks and courses often use different words for the same idea, and being tested on the textbook's vocabulary when your exam uses the lecturer's is a genuine source of confusion.

Upload your lecture notes or the syllabus alongside and say:

Use the terminology from my lecture notes, not the textbook's, and tell me where they differ.

That last clause is useful on its own. Where the two disagree is often where the concept is subtle.

Check anything that will be marked

It explains clearly. Clear and correct are different properties, and a fluent wrong explanation is harder to catch than a confused one.

For anything that will be assessed, cross-check against the chapter. A quick way: ask it to quote the sentence from the chapter its explanation is based on. If it cannot produce one, treat the explanation as its own rather than the book's.