How to make MCQs from a PDF or lecture slides (and check they are any good)

It is the week before a quiz, you have forty slides from your teacher, and the only practice you have is rereading them. Rereading feels productive and tests nothing. Multiple-choice questions fix that, but writing them yourself takes longer than the studying. This is how to get a set from the file you already have — and, more importantly, how to tell a good question from a bad one.

What can you upload?

A PDF, a PowerPoint (.pptx), a Word file, Markdown or plain text. A slide deck is read slide by slide, so you can find where a question came from. One limit worth knowing before you start: a PDF has to contain real, selectable text. A photographed or scanned page is an image to the app, and there is no OCR step, so run it through OCR first or it will have nothing to read.

Step by step

• Upload the file from the home page. It opens in the same reader as a researched course.
• Open the Practice panel and choose Quiz. Porphy generates a set from your material: 4–8 questions, four options each, exactly one correct, and a short explanation of why.
• Answer without looking at the slides. The explanation after each question is part of the exercise, not an extra.
• If you want something to carry around, generate flashcards from the same material — a deck is 4–12 cards, each a question and an answer.

How do you check a generated question?

Treat every generated question as a draft by someone who read your slides quickly. Four checks take about ten seconds each:

• Is the answer actually on your page? Ask the chat, which answers from your document, where the slides say it. If neither of you can find it, drop the question.
• Is exactly one option defensible? A distractor that is also true — or an option that is only true in a different chapter — is the most common fault.
• Does the question test the idea or only the wording? If you can answer it by matching a phrase from the slide, you are practising reading, not understanding.
• Does the explanation say why the wrong options are wrong, or just restate the right one? Only the first teaches anything.

What MCQs from slides will not do

Questions drawn from your slides test what is in your slides. They do not know what your teacher stresses, how your board sets its papers, or what last year's exam asked. A set is a way to find the gaps in your own recall tonight, not a prediction of the paper. For application questions — the kind where you have to use an idea on a case you have not seen — ask the live tutor to let you explain the idea back in your own words; it will tell you what you left out.

A whole subject, not one file

If your material is spread across slides, a textbook chapter and class notes, put them in one Project. You can then ask questions across all of them, with each answer pointing to the material and page it came from, and build one study guide over everything. See how to study from lecture slides for that workflow.

Cost, plainly: a quiz or flashcard set is about 10–30 credits. The 2,000 free credits every new account starts with cover roughly 100 of them at a typical cost, rounded down.