Problem Roulette is a tool to help students study by practicing questions from previous exams.
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What is Problem Roulette?
Supports practice testing and distributed practice
Problem Roulette supports practice testing and distributed practice – study strategies that education research shows are the most effective. And the material is authentic: it’s from actual old exams.
Free and equal access to past exam questions
In the past, instructors used to post a small number of old practice exams that student groups hoarded, and only their members benefited from the practice. Problem Roulette (PR) gives students free access to an enormous library of past exam problems from over 11 courses at the University of Michigan to level that social imbalance.
Rich performance data
Students get instant feedback about their accuracy in each topic to help them guide what they need to study more.
Instructors can see how many students are practicing, accuracy level by topic, and how long it takes students to answer questions.
Instructors can use this data to inform what they might review with students or whether they might send students “question sets” to practice more.
Custom Practice Modes
Study Mode
- Solve as many multiple choice questions as you like, at your own pace, in the topics of your choosing.
- Practice topics right after you learn them in lecture.
- Brush up on lower accuracy topics after taking a practice exam.
- Study alone or with peers in real-time interactions, remotely or in person using group study feature.
Name That Topic
- Optional mode that can be turned on or off at instructors discretion.
- Solve PR questions, not by calculating an answer, but by identifying the correct topic that question is asking about.
- In an exam, if you know which topic the question is asking about, you can then draw on the knowledge, tools, and equations that go along with that topic.
Exam Mode
- Instructors or students can set up practice exam based on topics that’ll be on the real exam.
- Use a timer to make the experience authentic.
- After a practice exam, switch back to study mode to practice your topics with lower accuracy ratings or to get faster at solving problems.
Partner with Problem Roulette.
Let's get started!
Step 1: Contact the Problem Roulette team.
Step 2: Work with us to import old exam problems.
Step 3: Use Problem Roulette as much or as little as you want.
What Students are saying about Problem Roulette.
“The refreshing thing about PR was that I could actually practice all the formulas and concepts I had learned in class on new problems; no longer relying on memorization, the concepts actually stuck with me at exam time.”
“As someone who tends to take too long on each individual problem [Problem Roulette] allowed me to work more on my timing so that by the time the exam came around I could finish in the allotted time.”
“One thing I found very helpful about PR was that it allowed me to study for the test in the most targeted way possible. Thus I never had to worry about whether what I was doing would prepare me well for the exam because I knew that I was practicing only on problems that had actually been part of previous exams.”
