Playbooks · Everyday tasks · last verified 2026-10-23

Build a study plan for an exam from a syllabus

For a student × turning a syllabus into a week-by-week study plan for one exam × with Claude, uploading the syllabus file.

Before you start

You need the syllabus as a file you can upload, the exam date, and the number of hours per week you can actually study. Claude's help center explains uploading documents and images to Claude, including file types, size limits, and uploading to individual chats or to a project's Files section; it also states that PDFs over 1000 pages cannot be uploaded, and that in PDFs of 100 pages or fewer Claude analyses both text and visual elements, while PDFs from 101 to 1000 pages are processed as text only. An ordinary syllabus is well within those bounds, but a scanned image-heavy syllabus may behave differently — if the plan looks wrong, check what the upload actually captured.

Time and cost: NOT_MEASURED. No grade outcome or study-time saving is claimed here.

Do not upload anything beyond the syllabus: no student ID numbers, login credentials, or other students' work. The syllabus and your available hours are all the plan needs.

What "done" looks like

At the end of one sitting you have a plan that covers every topic in the syllabus before the exam date, in weekly blocks that fit the hours you said you have, with review days built in — and a list of topics the plan could not place, if any. Studying itself starts after this sitting.

Steps

1. Upload the syllabus to a new chat. Attach the file to an individual chat (Claude's help center describes uploading to individual chats, or to a project's Files section for reference across conversations — one chat is enough for this task). Tell Claude the exam date and your weekly hours in the same first message, so the plan is built around them from the start.
2. Ask for a topic list before a schedule. Paste:

   From the attached syllabus, list every exam topic exactly as
   the syllabus names it, grouped by unit or week as the syllabus
   groups them. Then list the exam date and the weighting of each
   topic, if the syllabus states one. Write UNKNOWN for any
   weighting the syllabus does not state — do not estimate it.

   The topic list is the checkable base: if a topic is missing here, it will be missing from the schedule too.

3. Turn the list into a weekly plan. Paste:

   Now make a study plan from that topic list. The exam is on
   [date]. I can study [number] hours per week on [days]. Give
   one row per week: week, topics, hours, and one review task.
   Put the heaviest-weighted topics earliest, and leave the last
   week before the exam for review only. If the topics do not
   fit in the hours I gave, say so plainly and list what does
   not fit — do not quietly shrink the hours per topic.

4. Check the plan against the syllabus yourself. Open the syllabus and tick off each topic against the plan. Check the exam date, and check that no week asks for more hours than you said you have.
5. Ask for practice questions only from the plan's topics. If you want self-testing, paste:

   Write 5 practice questions for [one topic from the plan],
   with answers on a separate list I can cover up. Base the
   questions only on the topic as named in the syllabus — do
   not add topics from outside it.

   Keep practice questions topic by topic. A mixed set feels productive and hides which topics you actually know.

Check the agent's work

• Every topic in the syllabus appears in the plan, under the name the syllabus uses. A renamed topic is a topic to verify, not a topic covered.
• The exam date in the plan matches the syllabus, and the final week is review, not new material, as requested.
• No week exceeds the hours you said you have, and the hours across weeks add up to a total you recognise.
• Weightings are either stated in the syllabus or marked UNKNOWN — no estimated weighting is presented as fact.
• Practice-question answers are ones you can verify from your course materials. An answer you cannot trace back to the course is an answer to check with your instructor or textbook, not to memorise.

What can go wrong

• It drops a topic. Long syllabuses lose items in summarising. The topic-list-first step and your tick-off in step 4 are the guards.
• It invents a weighting or a date. A confident percentage or a shifted exam date with no source in the syllabus is a fabrication. UNKNOWN is the correct answer when the syllabus is silent.
• It squeezes the plan to fit your hours silently. If the topics do not fit, a plan that pretends they do is worse than a plan that says so. The "say so plainly" instruction exists for this case — then you decide what to cut or where to find more hours.
• It reads a scanned syllabus badly. For non-PDF documents, Claude extracts text only and cannot read embedded images, per its help center; for PDFs over 100 pages, visual elements are not analysed. If the plan misnames topics, paste the syllabus text or split the file into smaller sections, as the help center suggests for large documents.

Limits

• The chatbot cannot know what your instructor will emphasise, what was covered in lectures but not written in the syllabus, or how the exam is marked. Those come from your course, not from this plan.
• It cannot submit work, access your course platform, or sit the exam. This playbook covers planning only.
• PDF limits apply as stated above: no PDFs over 1000 pages, and visual elements only for PDFs of 100 pages or fewer. A syllabus that is mostly scanned images may need to be pasted as text instead.

Verification

Checked 2026-10-23. This page was not run end to end; its capability claims rest on provider documentation fetched this run. Sources: Claude Help Center — Upload files to Claude (upload documents and images to Claude; files can go to individual chats or a project's Files section; PDF processing: text and visual elements in PDFs of 100 pages or fewer, text only from 101 to 1000 pages, no PDFs over 1000 pages; for large documents, divide into smaller sections; for non-PDF documents, text only is extracted and embedded images cannot be read). Omitted: no claim is made that Claude can access a course platform, predict exam content, or grade work — those steps were cut because they are not grounded in the fetched page, and the playbook says so in Limits. Limits of this verification: provider pages describe upload and processing behaviour, not whether any given plan covers a given syllabus — that check is the "Check the agent's work" section above.

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