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The review screen is where you fix a bad extraction, and it is the last step before anything reaches your deadline list. When a scan finishes, Semora writes the course itself, its class meeting blocks and its letter-grade scale right away, then holds every extracted assignment, quiz, exam, project and reading for your approval. Nothing in that list is saved until you tap save.

Semora tells you where it is least sure. Any item that came back with a confidence score under 0.8 carries a "Low confidence — please verify" badge. Any item whose date falls well outside the term carries "Date looks outside this term — double-check." The window is deliberately generous: the semester's own start and end dates plus or minus 45 days when the scan managed to read them, and a wide band around today — roughly four months back to ten months ahead — when it did not. So a date a week past the last class is not flagged, but a year typo or a date the professor copied from last semester's syllabus is. Tap the pencil on the row and correct it. Editing the date clears the out-of-term warning, because you have now looked at it.

Items with no date at all — "Final Exam, date TBA" — collect in a "Needs a date" section at the bottom of the review screen and start deselected. Semora will not let you select one until you give it a real date, because a deadline without a date cannot be saved at all. Give a date to the ones you can, leave the rest deselected, and add them from the course screen later when the professor announces them.

If a date is wrong after you have already saved, nothing special is required: open the task, tap Edit, and change the due date or time. Reminders for that task are cancelled and rescheduled from the new date automatically.

A scan that produces no course is not one failure, it is several, and Semora gives each one a different message so you know what to do next.

"This doesn't look like a course syllabus." This is a deliberate gate. It fires when the model reports the document is not a syllabus, or when the extraction comes back with no course name, no items and no meeting times — nothing usable. Semora returns before writing anything, so no phantom course or semester is created and the scan is not charged against your monthly count. Scan the syllabus, course outline, or class schedule instead of a reading list or a receipt.

"This syllabus is very dense and the response was cut off." The extraction ran long and got truncated. Scan one course at a time, or split a long packet into fewer pages per scan.

"The AI is busy right now — please try again in a minute" and "AI service unreachable." These appear only after Semora has already retried with backoff and failed over to a secondary model, so waiting a minute genuinely helps. "We're seeing unusually high demand right now" is a different thing — an app-wide spend limit, not your account. None of these count against your 5 free monthly scans. They do still count toward the rolling 24-hour cap of 20 scans described below, so a long run of failed attempts on one document can trip that separate limit even though your monthly count has not moved.

• Photograph the whole page flat, in even light. Glare and a cut-off margin are the two most common reasons a schedule table gets read wrong.
• A photo scan takes up to 5 pages, about 10 MB combined. Above that Semora tells you how many pages do fit before you waste the scan.
• A single PDF can be about 11 MB. For a long syllabus, a PDF reads more reliably than photos of the same pages.
• On the web app you can paste raw text instead — up to 60,000 characters. That is the free-tier route for Canvas assignment lists, since connecting Canvas, Blackboard or Moodle is a Pro feature.
• If the schedule lives in a separate handout, scanning it into a course you already have will pull that handout's deadlines onto the review screen, but it will not add or overwrite class meeting times or office hours. Those are written only when a scan creates the course, so a re-scan can never clobber a schedule you have hand-edited. Add or fix meeting times yourself from the course screen.

Free accounts get 5 syllabus scans per calendar month. The window is anchored to the start of the month in UTC, so the count returns to zero on the 1st. It is not a lifetime allowance and it does not roll over.

What counts is a successful extraction — a scan where Semora actually read a syllabus and returned it to you. Rejected documents, truncated responses, model outages and network failures are logged as failures and do not count. The one case that does count and can feel unfair: if the extraction succeeded and you backed out of the review screen without saving, the work was done and delivered, so it counts. Finish the review, even if you only keep two items.

The Scan tab shows how many scans remain — "3 of 5 free scans left this month", so you are never guessing, and it warns you before you spend the last one. Semora enforces the same limit in the app, on the server, and in the database, which is why the number you see and the number the server accepts always agree.

One other ceiling applies to everyone, Pro included: a rolling 24-hour cap of 20 scans per account, which exists to stop runaway automated use. If you hit it you will see "You've reached the daily scan limit of 20." This is also why Pro scanning is best described as having no monthly cap rather than as literally unlimited — there is a fair-use daily ceiling behind it.

Two further limits apply only on free, and Pro is exempt from both. The first is 4 courses per semester. The second is one semester per account: a free account cannot start a second semester at all, so a new term is not a way to reset the 4-course allowance — unlimited courses and unlimited semesters both come with Pro. If you are at the course limit but still have scans left, Semora says exactly that and points you at re-scanning a course you already have.

Semora calculates your course grade from only the work that has a score. The denominator is the weight you have actually attempted, not the full 100% of the course, so a course with one 10% quiz graded at 80 reads as 80%, not 8%. That is the intended behavior, and it is why a grade can swing hard early in the semester.

If the average looks wrong, check the weights before anything else. Open the course and tap "Grade categories & rules." That screen shows a running category total that turns amber unless your categories add to exactly 100%. Categories are optional: with none, Semora uses the per-task weights the scan extracted; the moment you add categories, tasks are grouped and averaged inside their category and the category weights drive the course grade. A task that belongs to no category simply does not count.

Two other settings on that same screen change the math. "Drop lowest" excludes the N lowest scored items in a category once enough grades exist, and always keeps at least one. The extra-credit rule has three options: Bonus adds the task's weight scaled by its score on top of your percentage and caps the result at 100; Category folds extra credit into its category average; Ignore keeps the work visible but out of the math. A third lever lives on the task itself rather than on that screen: a task can be scored as a percentage or as points earned out of points possible, and if every graded task in a category has points, Semora sums the points rather than averaging percentages, which is what most professors actually do. Set that in the task editor, not in Grade Setup.

The letter grade comes from the grading scale the scan pulled off your syllabus — on every plan, free included. If your professor puts an A at 93, that is what Semora uses; the standard 90/80/70 cutoffs are only the fallback when a syllabus does not state a scale. Changing those cutoffs by hand is Pro: open the course, tap Edit Scale, and set each letter's minimum percentage. On free the scanned scale is used as-is, and free accounts see a locked "Customize grade scale" row instead of the editor. Grade tracking with weighted averages and your semester GPA are both free, and GPA uses a separate table under Settings, GPA Scale, weighting each course by its credit hours. Grade Scale editing and grade forecasting are the Pro parts.

Start with Me, Settings, Notifications. Two things on that screen answer most reminder questions. At the top, an amber "Notifications are off" banner appears whenever iOS permission is missing — tap it to go straight to the system setting. Further down, a Delivery health card reports the live permission state, how many reminders are currently scheduled on the device, when Semora last scheduled anything, and the last error if there was one. Tap the refresh icon to re-run the check.

If permission is fine and reminders still do not arrive, work through the specifics. A reminder whose fire time has already passed is never scheduled, so a task added a couple of hours before it is due can end up with only the alert at the deadline itself. Free accounts get same-day reminders only, and the timing follows the task: for a task with a due time, the same-day alert fires at the deadline itself, and for an all-day task it fires at 9 AM. On top of that comes a last call, two hours before a timed deadline, or 7 PM for an all-day task. So a paper due at 11:59 PM is nudged at 9:59 PM and again at 11:59 PM; there is no separate morning alert unless the task has no due time. The 1-day and 3-day advance reminders are Pro, and so is custom reminder timing with quiet hours; with quiet hours on, a reminder that would land inside the window is pushed to the end of it rather than dropped.

There is also a hard iOS limit worth knowing. The operating system silently discards new notifications once a single app has 64 pending. Semora stays under that by capping itself at 60 and dropping the furthest-out reminders first, on the reasoning that a same-day alert matters more than a 3-day heads-up for something three weeks away. If you track a very large number of tasks with 3-day reminders on, the most distant ones are the ones you will not see.

Two more notes. When you upgrade to Pro, Semora reschedules reminders for every incomplete task you already had, so existing deadlines pick up the 1-day and 3-day alerts without being edited one by one. And reminders on the web app are different by design: browsers cannot schedule a notification for a future date, so the web app checks every 60 seconds while the tab is open and notifies for timed tasks due within five minutes. It is a supplement to the iPhone app, not a replacement, and some browsers block it entirely. Device calendar sync, which is Pro, does not run in a browser either — that one is iPhone-only.

One account, three surfaces, one database. Tasks, courses and semesters are subscribed to in real time, so a task you check off on the web disappears from your iPhone within seconds rather than at the next refresh. Deletions propagate the same way. A bulk change — importing a scanned syllabus, or joining a Course Space a classmate shared — arrives as a single update rather than dozens of separate ones. Joining a Course Space someone invites you to is free; hosting one is Pro.

If a device looks stale, the connection is the usual cause. The realtime channel reconnects on its own with a backoff that starts at two seconds and tops out at 30, so a subway tunnel or a laptop waking from sleep resolves itself. Backgrounding the app and reopening it forces an immediate refetch. On the web, reload the tab.

Work done offline is queued on the device rather than lost — not only edits, but the courses and tasks you create while disconnected, which are given their ids up front so you can keep editing them before the server has ever seen them. Me, Settings, Offline & Sync shows exactly where things stand: Waiting, Failed and Conflicts, plus when the last successful sync happened. Queued changes retry automatically with increasing delays, and after six attempts an item is parked instead of retrying forever. Parked items are what the "Try sync now" button is for — it forces a retry of everything, including the items the automatic flush deliberately skips.

Conflicts are handled by asking, not guessing. If the same task changed on another device while you were offline, Semora pauses your edit instead of overwriting either version and lists it on that screen with two choices: "Use cloud version" or "Keep my edit." If the task was deleted elsewhere, it tells you that instead. A conflict count above zero is the one sync state that will not clear on its own.

Pro is bought once, in the iOS app, through Apple — $3.99 a month or $19.99 a year, which works out to about $1.67 a month on the annual plan. There is no checkout on the web. What the purchase produces is a server-side entitlement attached to your account, and every surface reads that same record, which is why Pro applies account-wide, including in the browser, without a second payment.

If the iPhone app shows Pro and the web app does not, the browser is reading a record that has not been refreshed yet. Reload the tab first. If it still does not appear, open the iPhone app, go to Settings and tap Restore Purchases: on iOS that re-validates the App Store receipt and rewrites the entitlement. Then reload the web app. "Restore" in the browser cannot do this, with no device receipt to validate, it can only re-read what the server already knows.

Two specific outcomes are worth recognizing. "Subscription Linked Elsewhere" means the App Store subscription is already bound to a different Semora account; sign in to the account that originally bought it, since one subscription cannot serve two accounts. "No Subscription Found" right after a purchase that clearly went through usually means validation has not landed yet — wait a moment and tap Restore again.

Semora deliberately does not downgrade you on an error. If a network or server problem makes the entitlement unreadable, the answer is treated as unknown rather than as "not subscribed," so a bad connection never turns a paying account free in the middle of a session.

Semora cannot cancel your subscription, and neither can we — Apple owns the billing relationship. Cancel on your iPhone under Settings, your Apple Account, then Subscriptions. The app links straight there from Settings, Manage Subscription. Canceling stops the next renewal; Pro features keep working until the period you already paid for ends, at which point the account reverts to free limits (5 scans a month, 4 courses, one semester) with all of your data intact.

The trap worth naming: deleting your Semora account does not cancel your subscription. Apple keeps billing until you cancel it in your Apple Account settings. The delete-account screen warns Pro users about this, but do it in this order — cancel with Apple first, then delete the account. Refunds are Apple's too, requested through reportaproblem.apple.com.

Semora stores what you would expect: your semesters, courses, tasks and grades, the syllabus files you upload, and any course notes you attach. Uploaded files live in private per-user storage, and every row is scoped to your account at the database level rather than by what the app happens to display.

Deletion is permanent and Semora treats it that way. Go to Me, Settings, Delete Account. You will be asked to verify with Face ID, Touch ID or your device passcode, and then to sign in again — the server requires an actual sign-in within the last five minutes, not just a valid session, so an unlocked phone in someone else's hands cannot delete your account. If you verify with a different account than the one on screen, nothing is deleted and Semora tells you so.

What deletion removes: uploaded syllabi and course notes are cleared from storage first, then your tasks, scan history, courses, semesters, profile and the login itself. There is no recovery and no grace period.

If you only want a clean slate for a new term, deleting the account is the wrong tool for it. On Pro, just start a new semester — unlimited semesters is part of what Pro buys, and last term stays intact next to it. On free you get one semester per account, so a second one needs Pro; the clean slate there comes from reusing the semester you already have, editing or removing the courses you are done with and scanning the new ones into it. And if you want your data out before you go, Pro accounts can export from Progress Insights as CSV, and Pro calendar sync can export your deadlines as an .ics file.