Help Center

Click "Get started free" from the welcome page and sign up with your name, email, and a password.

Once you're signed in, you'll land on your dashboard — from there, browse the book catalog and request access to whichever book you want to start studying.

If an admin created your account for you, they'll give you an email and a one-time temporary password instead of you signing up yourself.

Sign in with those — you'll immediately land on a "Set a new password" screen instead of your dashboard. Enter the temporary password as your current password, choose a new one, and you're through to the app as normal from then on.

Open any book from the catalog and click "Request Access." Access is granted per book, not account-wide, so you only request the books you actually want — there's no single approval step that unlocks everything.

Your request shows as Pending on the book page while an admin reviews it. You'll get a notification once it's approved. If it's denied, you can simply request it again.

Some books have a time-limited grant — if yours has an expiration date, it's shown on the book page, and you'd need to request access again after it passes.

StudyOwl is fully responsive and works great in your phone's browser as-is, but you can also install it to your home screen for a more native, full-screen feel.

On iOS Safari: tap the Share icon, then "Add to Home Screen." On Android Chrome: tap the menu (⋮), then "Install app" or "Add to Home Screen."

Once installed, pages you've already visited — like your dashboard and recently opened chapters — stay available even without a connection. Starting a new quiz or exam still needs a connection, since scoring happens on our servers.

Every chapter has a practice quiz you can take as many times as you like. Each attempt draws a fresh set of questions, and your best score is what counts toward your mastery level.

Getting enough practice attempts and a high enough score unlocks that chapter's Mastery Challenge — the exam that actually marks the chapter as Mastered.

Some questions have a hint available — a button below the answer choices, before you submit. Revealing it doesn't cost you the attempt, but it does halve the XP that question is worth if you answer correctly.

If you answer wrong without ever revealing the hint, it still shows up afterward in your feedback so you can learn from it — but only using it during the question itself carries the XP cost.

Practice Quiz, Skills Exam, Mastery Challenge, and Section/Final exams all prefer questions you haven't answered before — in any book, any session type — before reaching into ones you've already seen.

This is deliberate: it stops you from passing an exam purely because you recognize a question from earlier, rather than actually knowing the material. Once you've genuinely worked through a chapter's whole pool, repeats become unavoidable and selection quietly falls back to normal random draws.

Practice (spaced repetition) and Mixed Review are the exception — showing you material you've seen before is the entire point of those two.

Practice Quiz, Skills Exam, Mastery Challenge, and every Section and Final Exam show your best score and total attempt count right on the card where you'd start it — no need to dig through history to see how you're doing.

These update the moment you finish an attempt, whether or not it beats your previous best.

Each chapter shows one of six mastery levels so you always know what to focus on next: Not Started, Learning, Practicing, Improving, Proficient, and Mastered.

You move from Learning to Practicing once you've made a practice attempt. Your best practice score then pushes you up through Practicing, Improving, and Proficient. Passing the chapter's Mastery Challenge is what moves it all the way to Mastered.

A chapter's Practice Quiz and its Skills Exam draw from two separate, non-overlapping pools. Skills Exam questions are the ones tagged as case-based/application questions — those are reserved for Skills Exam and won't also turn up in the Practice Quiz.

Everything else in the chapter's question bank — the recall-style questions — is what the 15-question Practice Quiz draws from.

The Mastery Challenge is a tougher, adaptive exam for a single chapter — it unlocks once you've practiced enough within that chapter.

You need a score of 90% or higher to pass. Passing marks the chapter Mastered, which also makes its questions eligible for Mixed Review. You can retake it any time to try for a better score.

Once you've mastered all the chapters in a section, that section's exam becomes available — a timed test covering everything in it. The same applies at the book level: master every section and the book's Final Exam unlocks.

These are the widest checkpoints in a book, meant to confirm you've retained material across chapters, not just within one.

Practice, in the navigation bar, resurfaces questions you've previously missed on a spaced schedule — 1, 3, 7, 14, 30, then 90 days out — so they move into long-term memory instead of being forgotten.

It pools questions across every book you have access to, so there's nothing to pick — just open it and go. If nothing is due, you're already caught up.

Mixed Review shuffles together fresh questions from every chapter you've mastered, across all your books. It's for staying sharp on material you already know, rather than reviewing mistakes.

Like Practice, there's no book to pick — just open it from the navigation bar or your dashboard. If you haven't mastered a chapter yet, it'll tell you so and point you back to practicing one.

No. Practice, Mixed Review, and your daily/weekly quests are all independent of each other — there's no sequence to follow.

Practice only has something for you once you've missed a question before. Mixed Review only has something for you once you've mastered at least one chapter. Whichever one has something waiting is worth doing; if neither does yet, focus on chapter practice until they do.

Hearts are your attempts budget for quizzes and exams. You start each day with a full set and lose one every time you answer a question wrong.

Running out mid-quiz doesn't automatically end it — you're offered the choice to buy a heart and keep going, or stop there. Only starting a brand-new quiz requires hearts you don't have, and that refills automatically once a day.

If you run out early, you don't have to wait — you can spend XP to buy a heart back immediately, either from the hearts indicator in the header or, if it happens mid-quiz, from a prompt right there in the question feedback.

This only spends XP that's earmarked as spendable; it never reduces your all-time total, so buying hearts doesn't affect your leaderboard rank.

The header shows two related but different numbers: ⭐ Total XP is your permanent, all-time score — it only ever increases, and it's what the leaderboard and your level are based on.

🪙 Spendable XP, shown wherever you can buy a heart, is a separate running balance of how much of your Total XP you haven't already spent on hearts. Buying a heart lowers your spendable balance but never touches your Total XP or your rank.

You earn XP for every question you answer correctly — more for harder questions, plus a bonus that grows with your daily streak. You also earn XP for completing daily and weekly quests and for unlocking achievements.

XP is cumulative and never decreases, which is what makes it a fair measure for the leaderboard and your level progress, even though you can also spend some of it on hearts.

Your streak counts consecutive days you've studied. Answering at least one question on a given day keeps it going; missing a full day resets it.

To help you remember, turn on the daily reminder push notification from your profile page — it'll nudge you before your streak is at risk.

The leaderboard ranks every student by total XP earned, all-time. Since your XP total is never reduced (spending on hearts is tracked separately), your rank always reflects how much you've genuinely studied.

The bell icon in the header shows your unread notifications — new achievements, book request updates, and replies to reports you've submitted.

Click "View all" in the dropdown to open your full notification history, including ones you've already read. New items are highlighted until you open the bell.

By default, new activity only shows up in the in-app bell the next time you visit — nothing is pushed to you automatically.

Turning on push notifications from your profile page changes that: reminders (like your streak nudge) then arrive as real system notifications on your phone or desktop, the same as any other app, even when StudyOwl isn't open.

On desktop, push requires your browser to support it and the site to have a registered service worker; on phone, it works best once StudyOwl is installed to your home screen.

Go to your profile page while signed in — there's a dedicated section for updating your password.

If you spot a wrong answer, a typo, or something that's just broken, use the flag icon available throughout the app to send a report. Pick a category and describe what you found — it goes straight to the admin team.

An admin will review it and can resolve it with a reply, which you'll get a notification about. You can check a report's status and any reply at any time.

A few common reasons: you're out of hearts and waiting on the daily refill (or you can spend XP to buy one back); you don't have approved access to that book yet; or, for Mixed Review specifically, you haven't mastered any chapters yet.

Each of these shows a specific message when you try to start, so check what it says — it'll tell you exactly what's blocking you and what to do next.