Semora vs Mindgrasp: which is right for you?

Syllabus-first vs. file-first, mechanically

The difference between these two tools is not AI quality. It is what the AI is pointed at and what it leaves behind. Semora reads one specific document, your syllabus, and writes durable structure out of it: a course record with its code and instructor, the class meeting blocks (days, start and end time, kind, room), office hours, semester start and end dates, the letter-grade scale, and every assignment, quiz, exam, project, and reading with a due date, a due time, and a percentage weight. That structure is the thing you keep and edit for four months. A file-first tool, by design, produces an artifact per upload — notes, a summary, flashcards, a quiz for that one file. Both are legitimate jobs. Only one of them ends with a calendar.

Semora also splits the write into two stages on purpose. The course, its meeting times, and its grading scale are saved as soon as the scan finishes, because those are rarely contested and you want them on your schedule immediately. Only deadlines wait for your approval. The review screen lists every extracted item with a per-item edit control, badges anything the model scored under 0.8 confidence as "Low confidence — please verify," badges anything dated outside your term as "Date looks outside this term — double-check," and parks undated items like "Final exam — TBA" in their own "Needs a date" section, deselected, so an invented date never reaches your calendar.

The practical effect is that you correct a scan in week one instead of discovering a wrong date in week nine, and the version that gets saved is the one you edited, not the one the model guessed.

Getting Canvas, Blackboard, and Moodle dates in

Mindgrasp's Chrome extension pulls content out of Canvas and Blackboard pages; Semora imports the dates. Importing from a learning platform is free on every plan and does not use your AI action. Moodle connects through the personal calendar link Moodle already gives you: sign in to your own Moodle in a browser and go to Calendar, then Import or export calendars, Export calendar, Get calendar URL, copy that link and paste it in. There is no token and nothing for an administrator to enable, and your Moodle password never goes into Semora. Blackboard is the exception, because it runs on a token your institution has to issue, so whether it works depends on your school.

A calendar feed carries dates rather than marks: no grades, no submission status, and an assignment your professor never gave a due date does not appear, because the platform never made a calendar event for it. The syllabus scan is how those weights and undated readings get in.

How deadlines, grades, and planning are wired together

Every deadline Semora extracts carries two fields that most task apps do not have: a task type and a percentage weight, both read off the syllabus. Those fields are what let one scan drive three different views instead of one flat list.

Grades come first. The running course grade is a weighted average computed against your professor's real rules (grade categories, drop-lowest policies, and an extra-credit setting) and converted to a letter using the scale the scan lifted from the syllabus. Weighted course grades and your semester GPA are both on the free tier. Pro adds the forecasting layer: a "What do I need?" card that, for each letter on your scale, shows the average you would need across the weight still in play and labels it "Locked in," "avg 84% on the rest," "Needs extra credit," or "Out of reach"; plus a final-exam what-if that projects the course grade for a hypothetical score without saving anything.

Planning uses the same fields. The Pro Workload dashboard groups your incomplete dated work by week and scores each week by weight times a prep multiplier (exams count triple, projects 2.5x, quizzes 1.5x, assignments 1.2x, readings 1x), then flags a week as crunch only when it is a genuine outlier: well above a normal week for your semester, and holding at least two items. Academic Risk alerts, also Pro, watch three separate signals: overdue work, a course whose last three graded items average seven or more points below the three before them (or sits under 70 percent), and five or more deadlines inside a seven-day window. Each one arrives with a specific first step rather than a red badge.

What happens when a due date moves

Professors move dates, and that is where a planner either earns its place or becomes another thing to maintain. In Semora you change the due date once, on whichever device is in your hand, and everything derived from that date follows. Reminders for that task are cancelled and rebuilt — same-day on free, plus 1-day and 3-day advance notices with quiet hours on Pro. The device calendar event refreshes if calendar sync is on; that sync is a Pro feature and it writes to the calendar on your iPhone or iPad, not inside a browser tab, though the .ics export downloads on the web just fine. The week scoring in the Pro workload view recomputes, which can move a crunch week or clear one.

Smart Plan, also Pro, re-plans over a rolling 14-day horizon using your own settings: a daily study budget of 60, 90, 120, or 180 minutes, sessions of 25, 45, or 50 minutes, separate weekday and weekend start times, and whether weekends count at all. It schedules around your class meetings and your calendar events rather than on top of them. Sessions you missed get auto-rescheduled and labeled "Moved from" the original date, so you can see what slipped. When work due inside the horizon genuinely will not fit your budget, the plan reports those minutes as at risk instead of quietly overbooking you.

All of this carries across iPhone, iPad, Android, and the web app in near real time on one account. A tool whose output is a per-file study artifact has no date to move — that is not a flaw in it, it is simply a different job.

What to check before committing a semester to any planner

This is worth doing regardless of which app you pick. Five questions separate tools that survive a semester from tools you abandon by October. Does it hold all of your courses in one place, or does it work one file at a time? Can you see and correct what the AI extracted before it becomes your calendar? Are the free tier's limits published as numbers you can check (scans, courses, terms) rather than left vague until you hit one? If you pay on your phone, does the subscription apply on your laptop? And does it compute your grade from your syllabus's actual weights, or just store the scores you type in?

Semora's answers, for the record: every course lands in one deadline list; deadlines pass through an editable review screen with confidence and out-of-term warnings before they are saved; the free tier's limits are published as numbers on the pricing page, with nothing expiring on a date; Pro is $4.99 a month or $29.99 a year (about $2.50 a month on the annual plan), bought once either with a card on the web through Stripe or inside the iOS app through the App Store, and applied account-wide whichever route you take, so the browser and the phone read the same entitlement rather than charging you twice; and the gradebook uses the weights the scan pulled off your syllabus.

The limits deserve the same directness. Semora does not connect to Google Classroom or directly to Google Calendar, so do not plan around either. Device calendar sync is iPhone and iPad only — a browser cannot write to your system calendar, and the .ics download is the web equivalent. Browser notifications on the web only fire while a tab is open. And Semora launched recently, so there is no long public rating history to point you at. Ask the same five questions of Mindgrasp on its own site before you decide — pricing and feature summaries go stale quickly, and both products are worth checking firsthand.