An AI Study Planner for College Students, Built From Your Syllabus

Smart Plan (Pro) does not start by asking you how long anything will take. It reads the incomplete, dated tasks you already have (whatever came out of a syllabus scan, a Canvas import, or a task you typed yourself) and assigns each one an effort estimate. If you entered your own estimate on the task, that number wins, as long as it is at least 15 minutes and no more than 48 hours; an estimate under 15 minutes is treated as no estimate at all. When there is no usable number, Semora starts from a base for the task type, scales it by the grade weight the scan pulled off your syllabus, and rounds up to the nearest 15 minutes.

Effort then gets spread, not dumped. On every planning day, a task contributes its remaining minutes divided by the number of usable days left before it is due, so a six-hour project due in three weeks shows up as a short session most days instead of a wall on the last night. On the day something is actually due, or once it is overdue, the full remainder gets scheduled rather than a slice.

When more work wants a day than your capacity allows, Semora ranks it. Each task's urgency is its load score — grade weight times a prep multiplier for its type — adjusted by its priority flag, divided by the days remaining, plus the pace it has to keep to finish on time. High priority multiplies by 1.55, low priority by 0.78. Heavier and nearer wins; ties break by due date and then title, so the same inputs always produce the same plan.

• Base effort by type: reading 45 minutes, assignment 90, quiz 75, exam 240, project 360, anything else 60.
• Weight multiplier: a task worth 25% or more of your grade gets 1.5x that base, 15% or more gets 1.25x, 8% or more gets 1.1x.
• Your own estimate overrides both of those, but only inside a 15-minute floor and a 48-hour ceiling — under the floor it is ignored, over the ceiling it is clamped.
• Daily capacity: 1, 1.5, 2, or 3 hours a day, defaulting to 90 minutes.
• Session length: 25, 45, or 50 minutes, defaulting to 45.
• Start times: separate weekday and weekend start times, defaulting to 5:00 PM and 10:00 AM, with weekends switchable off entirely.

The class meeting blocks the scanner extracted from your syllabus — days of the week, start time, end time — are not decoration. Smart Plan converts them into blocked intervals and will not place a session on top of one. When a candidate session collides with a class, the planner jumps past the end of that class and tries again rather than shrinking the session or dropping the task.

On iPhone and iPad, leaving "Avoid calendar conflicts" on adds your device calendar to the same wall. Semora reads events for the next 14 days only, read-only, the planner never creates or edits an event, and pads each one by 10 minutes on both sides so you are not walking out of a meeting straight into a study block. All-day events are ignored, since they say nothing about your hours. An event that crosses midnight is split by day so each date is judged on its own.

Smaller rules keep the plan physically possible. Sessions are separated by a 10-minute gap. Today's first session never lands in the past: the planner starts from the next 15-minute mark after the current time, or your preferred start time, whichever is later. If a task is due later today at a specific time, its session is placed before that time. Sessions you already completed stay reserved, so a rebuild cannot stack new work onto an hour you already spent.

A plan built on Sunday is wrong by Wednesday. Every time you open Smart Plan — on every visit to the screen, not only on app launch — it regenerates. Unfinished sessions are deleted and rebuilt from today forward using your current tasks, current preferences, and current class schedule. Completed sessions are never touched: they stay as history, and the minutes you logged are subtracted both from that task's remaining effort and from that day's capacity.

That is what makes a moved due date a non-event. A professor pushes the midterm back a week, you edit the date once, and the next time you open your plan the sessions for it have redistributed across the longer runway. Mark a task complete and its remaining sessions disappear on their own. Add a task and it competes for time on the next rebuild. The rebuild is deterministic and idempotent — running it twice never duplicates a session.

The plan is also honest about what does not fit. If your daily capacity cannot absorb everything due inside the 14-day window, Semora states the shortfall in plain minutes (for example, that your current capacity leaves three and a half hours of work due within two weeks unscheduled) and names the two real levers: raise your daily study time, or lower your effort estimates. It does not quietly truncate the list and let you discover the gap later.

Skipping happens. When you open the plan, any unfinished session sitting in the past — an earlier day, or an earlier hour today — counts as missed. Its task goes back into the pool and is rescheduled into the next slots that fit, and the new session is stamped with where it came from. Under the session time, the row carries a "Moved from" line with the original date on it, so the plan is not quietly rewriting your history behind you.

A banner at the top of the screen summarizes what just changed: how many missed sessions moved forward, and how many calendar conflicts were avoided. If you would rather the plan hold still, turn auto-reschedule off in plan preferences and rebuild on demand with the refresh button instead.

Every unfinished session carries a play button that opens the Focus timer already loaded with that task and that session's length. The plan and the timer are the same object, not two lists you keep in sync by hand.

Smart Plan answers "what do I do in the next two weeks." The Workload dashboard (Pro) answers "when does this semester get bad." It buckets every incomplete dated task into calendar weeks across your semester's start and end dates, or, if you never set those, across the range of your own due dates, and draws one bar per week.

Bar height is a load score, not a task count. Each task contributes its grade weight multiplied by a prep factor for its type: exams count triple, projects 2.5x, quizzes 1.5x, assignments 1.2x, readings and everything else 1x. A task the scan could not find a weight for still contributes a small base value, so an unweighted exam is never invisible on the chart.

The dashboard also prints the weeks left in the term next to the semester name, which changes how the chart reads. Six heavy bars with eleven weeks left is a scheduling problem. The same six bars with three weeks left is a different conversation.

• Crunch weeks are outliers, not merely busy weeks. A week is flagged when its load is at least one standard deviation above the mean of the loaded weeks and it holds at least two items. If every week carries near-identical load, nothing gets flagged, because a chart where everything is red tells you nothing.
• Exam density gets its own strip: incomplete exams grouped by week, earliest first, so three midterms landing in the same week is visible in September instead of the night before.
• Load by course lists your courses heaviest-first with how many items remain, a bar for relative load, how much of your final grade that course's weighted work adds up to, and the next deadline by name and date. Courses with nothing left are dropped from the list.
• A short "start on this next" list ranks your top three by load divided by days remaining and tiers them as Do now, Coming up, or Plan ahead. It is deterministic math rather than an AI call, and it respects start dates, so work you cannot begin yet stays out of it.

Smart Plan and the Workload dashboard are both Pro. Free is not a stripped demo, though — it is a complete tracking layer without the scheduling engine on top. You still get every deadline the scanner pulls out of your syllabus, in a calendar and a task list, with weighted grade tracking, your semester GPA, and reminders on the day work is due.

One boundary is worth knowing before you start, because it is not the usual per-month cap: a free account covers one semester, total. The 4-course limit lives inside that single term and does not refill in January — a free account cannot start a second semester at all, in the app or in the database, which is where Pro's unlimited semesters actually earn their keep.

Pro is $3.99 a month or $19.99 a year, which works out to about $1.67 a month and is roughly 58% cheaper annually. You buy it inside the iOS app through the App Store, and the entitlement applies to your whole account, so the web app reads the same Pro status. There is no separate web checkout.

• Free: 5 syllabus scans per calendar month, up to 4 courses, and one semester per account. Full deadline and task tracking, grade tracking with weighted averages, semester GPA, same-day reminders, and joining any Course Space a classmate invites you into.
• Pro adds the planning layer: Smart Plan, the Workload dashboard, unlimited courses and semesters, syllabus scanning with no monthly cap (a fair-use ceiling of 20 scans in a day), custom reminder timing (1-day and 3-day) with quiet hours, device calendar sync with .ics export, Canvas, Blackboard and Moodle import, hosting your own Course Space, Flashcards, the Focus timer, the AI Tutor, Grade Scale and Forecasting, Academic Risk alerts, Progress Insights, and Share and Streaks.