Free AI Quiz Generator from PDF
Turn any PDF into a free practice quiz for active recall. Generate questions from your own notes and textbook, answer them, and repeat until the material sticks.
Upload your PDFFree AI quiz generator from PDF
Calten is a free AI quiz generator that turns any PDF into a set of practice questions. Upload your PDF and get questions instantly — no subscription, no credit card, no manual work.
Better questions, not just more questions
Calten creates both multiple-choice and open questions so you can practise recalling information and explaining the material in your own words.
Focuses on content worth studying
Calten automatically identifies and skips low-value sections like bibliography, references, about the author, appendix, and index. Questions are generated from the meaningful study content — the parts of your PDF that actually matter.
MCQs and open-ended questions from the same PDF
The AI quiz generator creates both multiple-choice questions and descriptive questions so you can test surface recall as well as deeper understanding from a single upload. For a full walkthrough, read how to generate questions from a PDF.
Active recall beats passive rereading
Instead of rereading notes and feeling like you understand them, create a quiz from your PDF to test yourself on the material. Retrieving information from memory is consistently more effective for long-term retention than re-reading.
How to run a practice quiz on your own notes
Upload the chapter you have just read rather than a whole term of material. Answer every question before checking anything, then review the ones you got wrong and reread only those pages. Short, repeated practice sessions on the same PDF beat one long reread, because each retrieval attempt reconsolidates the material.
A few questions, then repeat
A practice quiz works best as a loop: generate, answer, review, repeat. If you want a quick set of questions to test yourself right after reading, the quiz generator from PDF is the fastest way in. If you would rather build something closer to a graded exam paper, use the AI test maker instead.
When an AI quiz generator helps most
It is most useful when you have material you must actually retain — textbook chapters, lecture notes, research papers you need to cite, or policy documents you have to apply. It is least useful for material you only need to skim once, because generating questions adds nothing if you never intend to retrieve the content again.
A real Calten example: capillary action
Source PDF
A one-page PDF explaining capillary action, with a source list and author credit. In this recorded generation, Calten produced four questions about the concept and none about the source list or author.
Generated questions
- How does the width of a tube affect the rise of water?
- Explain the mechanism of capillary action in a narrow glass tube.
Frequently asked questions about the AI quiz generator
- Is the AI quiz generator free to use?
Yes. Calten is free. Upload a PDF and generate a quiz without paying or creating an account. A free account only adds saved tests and progress tracking.
- Do I need an account to generate a quiz from a PDF?
No. You can generate questions as a guest without signing up. Creating a free account saves your tests so you can return to them and track progress over time.
- What is the difference between a quiz generator and a test maker?
A quiz generator is built for quick, repeated active recall — short sets of questions you use to check yourself after reading. A test maker is built for exam-style assessment, with longer papers and written answers. This page covers the practice use case; the AI test maker covers the assessment one.
- How many questions does it generate from one PDF?
It depends on how much substance the document contains. Calten generates as many distinct questions as the content genuinely supports rather than padding to a fixed count, so a dense chapter yields more questions than a short handout.
- Can I use it with lecture notes, not just books?
Yes. Any text-based PDF up to 500 MB works: textbooks, lecture notes, research papers, study guides, and long-form documents.
- Does it generate questions from the bibliography?
No. Calten detects and skips low-value sections — bibliography, references, about the author, appendix, and index — so questions come from the parts of the document worth studying.