Quizlet is a study aid in app form. In essence, it’s a flashcard app with smart features, and it can handle images, diagrams, various languages, and even audio uploads. It’s ideal for self-paced learning from home, as you can make your own study sets, get access to study sets created by instructors, or browse for sets uploaded by other users. Recent improvements to Quizlet make it more intelligent, too, so it’s better at getting you to work on whatever you’re struggling to remember rather than recycling what you already know. With a generous free account and plenty of advanced features in the Plus version, Quizlet is a great tool for students—and anyone who’s looking to learn.
How Much Does Quizlet Cost?
Quizlet has a free plan, a version that removes ads and lets you study offline, and a top-tier version that adds extra features. No matter which version you choose, you can use Quizlet as a web app, an Android app, or an iOS app.
Over the past few years, Quizlet’s prices for its paid versions have gone up by a lot. Quizlet Go is the version that’s ad-free and lets you use the app offline. It costs $35.88 per year. Quizlet Plus adds more features, and it costs $47.88 for a one-year subscription. Groups buying Quizlet Plus accounts get pricing by volume. Plus gives you everything in Go, and it also adds a few more features. This level lets you track your progress while learning, include diagrams and custom images in your sets, and add custom audio to your sets. You also get personalized study paths, smart grading, the ability to scan in documents, and rich text formatting.
Some study packs cost extra, even if you have a Quizlet Plus account. Prices vary. There’s a test prep company selling AP Chemistry study guides for $13.99, for example. This includes 10 study sets and 600 questions in total. Language learning app Babbel also sells Quizlet sets for helping you study vocabulary. To know whether these sets come from verified users, look for the icon of a blue badge with a check mark.
Who Uses Quizlet?
Anyone trying to memorize information can use Quizlet. It’s quite popular among primary and secondary school students (K-12), but also works well for university students, medical students, law students, and any adult learners who need to memorize information, including those studying for standardized tests or trade exams.
Teachers also can use Quizlet to make study sets for their students. Instructors can upload and organize information that they want their students to master. Then they can invite their classes to access the study sets they have created.
Quizlet has also been used in private industry. For example, it has been used to train grocery store cashiers and for onboarding new employees at a software company.
Getting Started With Quizlet
The first thing you have to do is create an account, and then you can start creating your own study sets or looking for ones you want to add to your files. To organize your study sets, Quizlet allows you to make folders. You can also join a class if an instructor gives you a link and then access all the materials for that class.
Quizlet is essentially a flashcard app, so every item in a study set has two pieces: a question or trigger and a response. For example, if you’re learning a language—and Quizlet is a fantastic complement to any language learning app—you’d have the word in the new language plus its meaning in your native language. Other kinds of learning might contain images. For example, let’s say you’re studying botany. The triggers might be pictures of different plants and the answer or response would be their names.
Making sets and editing them is straightforward. Quizlet supports uploading spreadsheets to make the process faster, if you already have study materials laid out in a compatible format. You can edit study sets that you make, but you can’t edit someone else’s set unless they allow it in the options for that set. You can, however, make a copy of a set (this function is labeled Customize) which you can then change to your heart’s desire.
Quizlet always gives you the option to keep your sets private if you don’t want anyone else to access them.
Seven Ways to Study
Quizlet gives you seven possible ways to study. Not all of them are applicable to all study sets.
First is Cards. Cards is a standard digital flashcard method where you cycle through your study set and try to memorize the information. Second is Learn. You see a prompt and select the right answer or match based on multiple choice answers, with all the possible answers coming from your set. Third is Write. You see a prompt and have to write the answer. Fourth is Spell. You hear an audio reading of the prompt but don’t see it in writing and have to type out the answer. Spell doesn’t work for study sets that incorporate images or diagrams. The fifth opinion is Test. In this mode, Quizlet creates a quiz for you with a mix of question types, including matching, multiple choice questions, and so forth. It’s important to note that this mode isn’t really designed for formal assessment. Sixth is Match. Here you see a bunch of cards on screen, half prompts and half answers, and you have to match them up. There’s a timer running so that you can turn it into a game and try to match up the sets faster than before or faster than your classmates. The last study mode is called Gravity. Like Match, it has a game angle. A prompt appears on an asteroid that appears to fall from the sky, and you have to write the answer before it hits the ground.
Language learners get some wonderful tools you won’t find in many other flashcard apps. For example, special characters appear when you’re typing so that you don’t have to frequently switch to a different keyboard. Additionally, when you create a study set of language vocabulary, you indicate the languages you’re using for one side of the flashcard and the other. This programming allows the app to speak words aloud with the correct pronunciation. When I used the app in Romanian, Spanish, and English, I found the pronunciation very good, with stresses usually landing on the correct part of the word and proper diphthongs and so forth. The voice doesn’t sound overly robotic, either.
Special Features for Plus Members
The newest feature for Plus members is the Quizlet Learning Assistant. When you create a new study set or add one, Quizlet now asks Plus members their goal for learning, such as whether they want to master the information or merely have a strong familiarity with it. The app then might quiz you to see what you already know and, based on your results, come up with a study plan for you.
The idea is to help you use your study set in such a way as to get you to your goal faster. That way, you spend less time reviewing material you already know and instead repeat flashcards or quiz questions using the material you’re still trying to learn.
Another feature for Plus members is called Smart Grading, which you can disable if you like. With Smart Grading, Quizlet doesn’t automatically score you wrong when you don’t write in an answer that’s letter-for-letter the same as the one in your study set. For example, in the image below, the prompt was a picture of a flag, and the answer was “Democratic Republic of the Congo.” If you left out the “the” in the answer or spelled one of the words wrong, Quizlet detects that the answer is close and gives you an opportunity to have it marked correct anyway. You can disable this feature if you’re trying to master something precise, such as spelling.
Excellent for Rote Learning
Structured around sets of terms and definitions, Quizlet is a platform for rote learning. For certain kinds of education and learning, it’s an incredibly useful tool to have. By and large, Quizlet contains some excellent flashcard study sets, although there is always the problem that user-created content may contain errors, present intentionally misleading information, or be problematic in other ways. It’s reasonable to have some worries about content, especially for parents or teachers of young students. That said, the vast majority of errors we’ve seen in Quizlet are minor, such as misspellings or slightly outdated information. You can report problematic content, but that isn’t of much help if you’re supervising the learning of a child. The app automatically filters content using quality scores drawn from user behavior, so better quality content is likely to rise to view whereas poor quality content should get buried.
Quizlet is a powerful study aid, one that works well in a variety of settings from traditional schooling to helping you master concepts from an online learning service. We like that you can make your own sets, share them, and find sets that others have created. The free tier of service is very good, though it leaves out some of the more advanced features, which is really the point of digital flashcards in the first place. The Plus membership has become much pricier in recent years, which may be a turnoff for those who have paid the much lower price for it in the past. If you can get past that, however, you’ll find that it’s still an excellent resource for learning, even at the higher price.
