General
StudyOwl is a gamified study and review platform for mastering any subject — not just medical board exams. You work through a curriculum of books, sections, and chapters, practicing questions and taking exams to master each topic.
Yes — StudyOwl is free to use for a limited time.
Yes. The app is fully responsive and can be installed to your phone's home screen for quick access, just like a native app.
Pages you've already visited (like your dashboard and recently opened chapters) stay available offline. Starting a new quiz or exam requires a connection, since your progress is scored on our servers.
Account & Book Access
Click "Get started free" and sign up with your name, email, and a password.
Sign in with the email and temporary password they gave you. You'll be asked to set your own password right away before you can do anything else — after that you're in as normal.
Yes, from your profile page once you're signed in.
Open the book from the catalog and click "Request Access." Each book is granted separately, so you only need to request the ones you actually want to study — there's no single account-wide approval step.
Your request goes to an admin for approval. You'll see it as Pending on the book page while you wait, and a notification lands in your bell once it's approved (or if it's denied, you can simply request it again).
Some book grants are time-limited. If a grant has an expiration date, it's shown on the book page — after that date you'd need to request access again.
Studying & Progress
Practice pulls in spaced-repetition review of questions you've missed before. Mixed Review shuffles together questions from every chapter you've already mastered. There are also timed Section and Final exams per book, plus a Mastery Challenge for each chapter and Skills Exam questions.
Practice is about retention — it resurfaces questions you've previously gotten wrong on a spaced schedule (1, 3, 7, 14, 30, then 90 days out) so they stick in long-term memory. Mixed Review is about breadth — it shuffles together fresh questions from chapters you've fully mastered, so you stay sharp across everything at once. Both work across every book you have access to; neither requires picking a specific book first.
Each chapter shows a mastery level based on your practice scores: Not Started, Learning, Practicing, Improving, Proficient, or Mastered. This tells you at a glance what to focus on next.
These are two different quizzes inside a single chapter (not the same as "Practice" in the navigation bar, which is the spaced-repetition tool across all your books). The Practice Quiz draws 15 questions from that chapter's general question bank. The Skills Exam draws its own separate pool of 10 case-based questions that ask you to apply what you've learned to a realistic scenario rather than recall a fact directly — those two pools don't overlap, so a Skills Exam question won't also turn up in your Practice Quiz. Skills Exam is only available on chapters that have that kind of question written for them. Both need an 80%+ score to count, and together they're the prerequisite for unlocking that chapter's Mastery Challenge — a chapter with no Skills Exam questions only needs the Practice Quiz passed.
Not if they can help it. Practice Quiz, Skills Exam, Mastery Challenge, and Section/Final exams all prioritize questions you haven't seen before — across any book or session type — so passing isn't just recall of something you already answered. A question only repeats once you've genuinely worked through the rest of that chapter's pool. (Practice and Mixed Review are the exception, by design — they exist specifically to resurface questions on purpose.)
It's the exam that actually marks a chapter as Mastered. It unlocks once you've practiced enough within a chapter, and passing it (90%+) moves the chapter to Mastered — which also unlocks it for Mixed Review.
Yes — Practice Quiz, Skills Exam, Mastery Challenge, and every Section and Final Exam show your best score and how many attempts you've made, right on the card where you'd start it again.
Yes, before you submit an answer — a hint button sits below the choices on questions that have one. Using it halves the XP you'd earn for that question if you get it right, so it's there when you need it but not free.
No — they're independent. Practice only has something to do once you've missed a question before; Mixed Review only has something to do once you've mastered a chapter. Do whichever ones have something waiting for you, in any order, whenever it's convenient.
Hearts, XP & Streaks
Hearts are your attempts budget for quizzes and exams — you start each day with a full set and lose one per wrong answer. Run out and you can't start a new quiz until they refill.
Hearts fully refill once every day. If you run out early, you can spend XP to buy one back immediately — including right in the middle of a quiz, so running out doesn't have to end your session. You'll only be forced to stop if you decline or can't afford it.
You earn XP for answering questions correctly (more for harder questions, and a bonus the longer your daily streak runs), for completing daily and weekly quests, and for achievements. Using a hint on a question halves the XP it's worth. XP is cumulative and also determines your leaderboard rank.
Total XP (⭐, shown in the header) is your permanent, all-time score — it only ever goes up and is what the leaderboard and your level are based on. Spendable XP (🪙) is a separate running balance of how much of that you haven't already spent on hearts — buying a heart lowers your spendable balance but never touches your Total XP.
Your streak counts consecutive days you've studied. Answer at least one question any day to keep it alive — you can also turn on a daily push reminder from your profile so you don't forget.
It ranks students by total XP earned, all-time. Since XP is never spent (only tracked separately for hearts purchases), your rank only ever reflects how much you've studied overall.
Notifications
Click the bell icon in the header. It shows your unread achievements, book request updates, and replies to reports you've submitted. Select "View all" to see your full notification history, read and unread.
That depends on whether you've turned on push notifications (from your profile). With push enabled, reminders arrive as real notifications on your phone or desktop even when StudyOwl isn't open, the same as any other app's notifications. Without it, you'll only see new activity in the in-app bell the next time you visit.
Reports & Support
Use the flag icon available throughout the app to send a report with a category and description. It's sent straight to the admin team.
An admin reviews it and can resolve it with a reply, which you'll get a notification about. You can always check a report's status and any reply on the same report.
Visit the Help Center for step-by-step guides, or reach out to your admin directly if you're stuck.