Re-reading feels productive, but the revision habits with the strongest evidence are answering questions from memory and spreading that practice out over weeks (Dunlosky et al., 2013). Cognito is a flashcard app built around both, with your GCSE course as context: choose your board and subject, and your practice is written and tracked against that specification.
Pick your board and subject
Cognito has a built-in profile for each of these 33 GCSE specifications: it knows the qualification code and the course’s topic list. Choose GCSE, then your exam board, then the subject. Each code links to the board’s own specification.
AQA
Pearson Edexcel
OCR
Eduqas
WJEC (Wales)
- Integrated Science (Single Award)3450QS
- Mathematics and Numeracy (Double Award)C00/4968/0
- The Sciences (Double Award)3455QD
CCEA (Northern Ireland)
Sitting a subject or board that isn’t listed, such as Cambridge (CIE)? Choose GCSE and your board, then enter the course details yourself. Cards still follow GCSE conventions, and your own notes decide what they cover.
What your course changes
- Question style
- Cards use the course’s terminology and question style. Your material still decides which facts appear.
- Tier
- Foundation or Higher, so questions aim at the paper you will actually sit.
- Topic coverage
- Practice is tracked across the course’s topics, so gaps are easy to spot. It is a study guide, not the complete official specification or a predicted grade.
- Command words
- In AQA Biology (8461), Chemistry (8462) and Physics (8463), questions use the specification’s command words, such as state, describe, explain, compare and evaluate.
- Marks
- A tariff such as [3 marks] appears only when your source gives one. Cognito does not invent mark schemes.
- Exam papers
- For AQA’s separate sciences, the course view lists each paper’s length and marks, as published by AQA.
Turn your notes into cards you trust
Start from a topic, pasted class notes or a photo of a textbook page. Cognito drafts the cards, and you check and edit each one in a preview before it is saved. An inaccurate card turns into a repeated mistake, so that check matters.
The free plan includes 10 AI generation batches a month on each device, plus one free try of a PDF, scan, audio, YouTube or web source. Premium removes the monthly limit and keeps every source available. Hand-made cards are unlimited on every plan, and Anki decks can be imported for free.
Space it out to exam day
Each review ends with a rating — Again, Hard, Good or Easy — and the FSRS scheduler uses it to choose when the card returns: tomorrow if it slipped, a couple of weeks later if it was easy. Try a review on the home page.
Add your exam date to get an Exam Plan. Set the weekdays you study and how many cards fit in a day; Cognito shows each day’s reviews and new cards, carries missed work forward, and keeps the final days before the exam for review. How to build a plan that fits your week.
Exam Plans and FSRS review are free. Plans live on iPhone and iPad, and your cards and review history also sync to Cognito for Mac, which is free to download too.
Independent, and careful with AI
Cognito is not affiliated with or endorsed by AQA, Pearson Edexcel, OCR, WJEC, Eduqas or CCEA; their names and codes belong to them. AI-written cards can contain mistakes or miss topics, so check them against your current specification.
Revise the GCSE you are actually sitting
Bring your notes, choose your board, and let each card come back when it needs to.
Get Cognito on the App Store