Frequently asked questions

Avery is an AI-powered study tool that helps undergraduate college students in STEM courses (science, technology, engineering, and math) supercharge their study efficiency. Avery is based on scientific research into how people learn. It helps you move from superficial familiarity with topics and “cramming” to genuine understanding and confidence – without increasing your study time.

Avery is designed around the specific needs of STEM students. It currently has course-specific support for Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Calculus, with more classes in the works. It can also be used for other courses that involve factual answers or equations.

Note that Avery is not a writing coach and isn’t suited for the humanities or other fields where evaluation is done primarily with essays. You may still want to add the course syllabus or assignment and test dates for these courses to Avery so you can use its study calendar feature to allocate your time effectively across your courses. But you won’t typically use Avery to study for these courses.

Avery has a Tutor built on state-of-the-art AI models. If you are accustomed to using a general purpose chatbot to help you study, you’ll feel at home with Avery. However, Avery’s Tutor is optimized for helping you learn, not just providing information. And it has a host of features that make your study time both more aligned with your class and instructor materials as well as more productive.

Avery helps you:

• Ground your study to your class — Avery allows you to upload the digital textbook, syllabus, lecture notes, problem sets, and other learning assets so it can provide assistance that aligns with the way your instructor teaches and grades your course. Avery also includes a library of openly licensed textbooks you can attach to a class.
• Verify answers — Avery cites the passage it drew from and links to it in your materials, so you can check what it told you against the source. When a cited lecture is a video, the link opens at the moment being cited.
• Ask for hints instead of answers — Avery has a hints-only mode that holds back the final answer and walks you toward it. It is there for the times you need to be able to do the problem yourself, not just see it done.
• Fill knowledge gaps — Research shows that the most common failure mode for students in STEM courses is not being able to recall things they learned in preparatory courses. Avery identifies key prerequisite knowledge for each study topic and provides quick, targeted tutorials that get you caught up.
• Track your learning progress — Avery estimates your learning progress for each topic in a course as you study so you can see which topics you’ve covered and where you’re still thin.
• Manage your study time — Avery helps you visualize your assignments, exams, and study progress across all your courses so you can make crucial decisions about how to prioritize your time week-by-week.
• Complete assignments faster and more accurately — Avery gives you instant access to seventeen built-in tools you can open beside your work. Among them: SymMath, a symbolic algebra and calculus workspace for doing the manipulation yourself and seeing each step; a grapher; the periodic table; unit conversion; vectors and free-body diagrams; molarity; Punnett squares and codons; and statistics and lab-data fitting.

Avery uses a three-stage study system based on learning science and honed to match the realities of college life. The steps are designed to be completed in order. However, Avery puts you in control. You can jump to a specific step or skip back and forth between steps as needed to reach your study goals.

1. Learn the material

• Identify and close prerequisite knowledge gaps.
• Get an overview of key topics, terms, and formulas and drill down when you want a deeper understanding.
• Use Avery’s 24/7 Tutor to get personalized tutorials to build your understanding.
• Supplement your learning with Avery’s library of openly licensed reference material for supported courses.
• For some topics in supported courses, work with interactive explorables called Enhancements — simulations you can manipulate to build intuition before you start solving problems.

2. Work problems

• Start with exercises assigned by the instructor. Avery’s Tutor can provide coaching, check your work, and even identify faulty mental models or reasoning patterns that are blocking you from getting correct answers.
• Enhance your learning by working additional problems. You can ask Avery to generate similar problems or you can enter your own by describing a problem, uploading a sketch or photo, or using Avery’s built-in symbolic formula builder.
• Use Avery’s STEM toolbox for instant access to reference materials and other useful tools that can help you work through problems more quickly.

3. Prepare for an exam

• Take quick quizzes or comprehensive practice exams and get personalized feedback on any questions missed. If you’re not happy with your score, repeat the process as many times as you’d like with a different exam each time.
• Customize practice exams to match your instructor’s testing style. Identify topics or textbook chapters that are likely to be tested more heavily. Specify the mix of multiple choice and short-answer questions.
• Use flash cards and memory sheets to help you memorize key terminology and formulas.

Avery allows you to set your current study focus area either by week based on your syllabus or by specifying particular topics. Switch from one to the other at any time. Whichever method you use, Avery remembers what you’ve already done in previous study sessions and allows you to easily pick up where you left off.

Syllabus

The simplest way to set your study focus area is to base it on a course syllabus that includes a weekly schedule or readings and assignments. You upload your instructor’s syllabus, choose a reference syllabus from the set that Avery provides, or create your own custom syllabus.

If you use a syllabus, you simply select which week of the syllabus you want to work on from a dropdown. Avery automatically sets the appropriate study topics. If you want your study session to cover multiple weeks of the syllabus (for instance, you’ve got a midterm coming up), you can use checkboxes to control which weeks from the syllabus you want to include.

Individual topics

If you don’t have a syllabus available or want more fine-grained control over the focus of your study session, Avery allows you to select specific topics to study without a pre-defined weekly study calendar. You can select one or more topics from a pre-defined list or add your own by simply typing a topic name.

Yes. Avery provides two categories of sources that can be included as context for AI-based features, plus a separate group you opt into deliberately.

1. Uploaded course materials
   Uploading a digital textbook, syllabus, lecture notes, and other materials provided by your instructor allows Avery to keep AI-generated explanations grounded to your specific class.
2. Open-source class materials
   For supported courses, Avery provides openly licensed reference course materials, including full courses contributed by instructors. You can use them if you don’t have class-specific materials to upload. Even if you do upload course materials, adding additional reference sources can be useful as supplementary material.

Materials that aren’t part of the current course appear separately, under Extra material (beyond this course), and are not used unless you select them. That keeps a reference book you added for one class from quietly shaping answers in another.

Each source category can be enabled or disabled individually. If you include reference material to supplement your uploaded course materials, you may get a richer, more diverse set of explanations and examples while you study, but of course these explanations won’t be as tightly tied to your class, textbook, and instructor. You can experiment to find the right balance for your needs.

You set your default source category preferences when you set up Avery. However, you can override the default source settings during a particular study session by opening the source selection panel. If you’re an advanced user, Avery even allows you to select individual sources for each topic included in the current study focus area.

Partly, and it is worth being precise about which part. Avery offers English, Spanish, and Simplified Chinese. When you choose Spanish or Simplified Chinese, the study content Avery generates for you — topic overviews, key topics, and practice — is written in that language.

What does not change is your source material. Avery works from your English textbook and notes rather than translating them. It deliberately leaves mathematical notation, formulas, code, and proper nouns as they are, and citations keep the original chapter and document titles, so a reference still points at something you can find on the page in front of you.

This does not yet cover every part of Avery. Some features still answer in English whatever the setting says, and we would rather tell you that here than have you find it mid-session.

Students who sign up with a .edu email by December 31, 2026 get their first month of Avery Premium free. After that, Avery Standard costs nothing, with no end date set. Avery is beta software, so we may change plans and prices in 2027. If your plan changes, we’ll email you at least 30 days before, and you can delete your account at any time. We don’t ask for a card to sign up. Details are on the pricing page.

Your coursework and your conversations with Avery are yours, and everything you need to manage them is under Settings → Account — no support ticket, no waiting on us.

• See it — request an archive of your data and we email it to you.
• Correct it — edit your name yourself. Changing your email address asks for your password and re-verifies the new address, so nobody else can move your account.
• Delete it — delete your account whenever you like. Deletion has a 30-day grace period you can cancel during, so a change of mind isn’t final.

Materials you upload are used to ground Avery’s answers for you, in your classes. Full detail is in our Privacy Notice.