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Turning your own past papers into practice

Upload a past paper and get practice questions for your own students. How to do it, what the AI gets wrong and how you catch it, where the questions land, and what to do if you ever meet one that is wrong.

The short version Open Papers in your console, drop in a past paper PDF, and Strivli reads it into practice questions for your students. You then go through them — approving, correcting or rejecting — and every picture has to be compared with the original page before it can be used. Nothing reaches a child until you have answered it yourself. Twenty papers a month, at no charge.

Importing a paper of your own

  1. Open Papers from your console

    It sits in the top bar beside Library. If you cannot see it, confirm your email address first — the link is in the message we sent when you signed up, and there is a "resend" button on your console if it has gone astray.

  2. Drop the PDF in — or a whole folder

    Drag one paper, several, or a folder with subfolders in it; there is also a choose a folder button. PDFs only, up to 8MB each, and they must be papers you are licensed to use with your students — that is your call and your awarding body's, not something Strivli can see. Anything that is not a PDF is ignored and counted.

    If the folder holds more papers than you have left this month, we say so before starting and read as many as your allowance covers. Drop the same folder again next month and nothing is wasted — a paper we have already read is recognised and skipped, and it does not count against your allowance a second time.

    Reading takes a couple of minutes a paper and carries on without you; close the tab if you like.

  3. Most questions will already be done

    Where the paper prints its own answer key and a second, independent reading of the question reaches the same answer, there is nothing for you to decide, so we do not ask. Those questions go straight to your students. See what we check for you below for exactly what that means.

    What is left is what genuinely needs a person: anything with a picture, and anything where the two readings disagree or one of them could not answer the question at all. Those arrive sorted by how much attention they need — Needs you first, then Worth checking.

  4. Add them to your library

    Questions you had to look at land as drafts in Your own questions, each still needing its Answer Check before a pupil sees it. The ones that were already confirmed skip that step and go out with your students straight away. Either way nothing is visible to anybody but your own students.

What we check for you, and what we will not

A twenty-paper month is well over a thousand questions. Asking you to press a button on every one of them would not be a check — it would be a queue you never got to the end of. So a question skips your review only when two independent things agree about its answer:

A question with a picture is never confirmed this way Whatever answers a diagram question is looking at our redrawing, not your paper. Shown “how many sides?” beside a seven-sided shape it counts seven and is marked correct — while the paper said eight. That is the whole reason a person compares every drawing with the original page, and no amount of agreement about the answer substitutes for it.

Where the two disagree, we stop and ask you, and that turns out to matter. On the first real paper we ran this way, ten questions had an answer key that did not match the question — the paper numbered its two sections from 1 each, so the key's entry for “question 9” belonged to the other question 9. Every one of those would otherwise have reached a pupil with a confident, plausible, wrong answer.

The one thing this cannot catch, said plainly: if a question's options were copied down wrong, the key still says “C” and the second reading still says “C”. Both agree and both are wrong. What catches that is your pupils — a question they answer worse than random guessing is withdrawn automatically, and you are told.

You can see which of your questions were confirmed this way, and read any of them, in Your own questions. Nothing stops you checking them yourself.

Twenty papers a month, and nothing to manage Strivli pays for the reading and absorbs the cost. Your screen shows how many you have left; the count resets on the 1st. There is no bill, no credit balance and no figure in pounds anywhere on your account. A paper counts when it is read, not when you add the questions — so a paper you upload and then decide against still counts, because the reading is the part that costs. If twenty is genuinely not enough for you, tell us and we will raise it.

Where your pupils' questions come from

Your students see two libraries at once: the common library — 1,223 questions across 41 topics, written for Strivli or read out of real SEAG-style papers — and anything you add yourself, whether you wrote it or imported it. About 146 of the common ones carry a drawing: a clock, a bar chart, a shape with its sides labelled, a net that folds into a cube.

You can also write questions from scratch, drawing included, which is often quicker for one-offs than importing a whole paper.

What happens to a paper before it becomes a question

  1. The pages are read twice

    Once as text, which is exact — every word and every option spelled the way the publisher spelled it. Once as a picture, which is the only way anything drawn can be seen at all: a diagram in a PDF is line art, not a photograph, so there is no image sitting there to lift out. The two go together, with the text trusted for the wording and the picture for anything drawn.

  2. Diagrams are redrawn, not copied

    A regular octagon comes back as "a polygon with eight sides", and Strivli draws it fresh from a fixed vocabulary of twenty-one kinds of drawing. That keeps a visual question a few dozen bytes rather than an image file, sharp at any size, readable by a screen reader, and working with no internet connection — none of which a photograph of somebody's page manages.

    And it creates one failure that nothing automatic can catch. An octagon read as a heptagon renders perfectly. It is a beautiful, crisp, entirely wrong question.

  3. Tables get the same treatment

    A results table, a timetable, a two-way survey table — these are transcribed rather than drawn, and they go wrong in exactly the same silent way. A table with one row dropped in transcription renders perfectly and is a different question. So a table is checked as a picture, not waved through as text.

  4. Anything that cannot be drawn faithfully is refused, never guessed

    Tested against a real paper, the reader refused a pie chart whose two unlabelled slices were the question, and a question built from five capital letters. Both came back saying what was actually on the page instead of inventing something close. A question whose picture could not be drawn cannot be approved at all until somebody either draws it by hand or drops the question.

  5. A person compares every drawing with the original page

    This is the step that matters most, it is the slowest step by far, and it is the reason the rest of this guide exists.

Why a person has to compare every drawing with the paper

On a real cube-nets question during testing, the reader produced five nets. Four were exactly right. The fifth had seven squares — and a net that folds into a cube always has six.

That particular mistake now raises a warning, because "a cube net has six squares" is a fact code can check. Most mistakes are not like that. Whether a clock reads twenty past three or twenty-five past, whether the shaded square is the third or the fourth, whether a bar reaches 14 or 15 — these are questions only somebody looking at both pictures can answer.

The handful of things code can settle on its own A net that should fold into a cube but does not have six squares. Pie slices that do not add up to 100%. Angles that already total more than a straight line or a full turn, leaving nothing to ask for. Each of these came from a real import going wrong rather than from imagining what might. The same three rules run on questions you draw yourself, for the same reason.

What the person checking a drawing actually has to do

Pressing a button that says "looks right" forty times in a row is not a check. So the screen is built to make that hard, and to make rejecting a question as cheap and as respectable as accepting it.

  1. The original page sits beside the pupil's own screen

    Not a description of the question, not a preview built for the reviewer — the actual page as printed, next to the question drawn by the same code that will draw it for your pupil. The thing being confirmed is literally the thing a child will meet.

  2. The drawing states what it claims, in words

    Beside the page there is a line reading, for example, polygon · sides 8. Comparing a heptagon with an octagon by eye is a bad task for a person; checking the number 8 against a page is a good one. The same line also names anything the drawing does not say — a clock with no minute hand set would draw itself from defaults and look entirely plausible, so the missing piece is spelled out rather than left to be noticed.

  3. They have to read one value off the paper first

    Before the "it matches" button does anything, the pupil's drawing is covered over and the reviewer is asked one question about the original: How many sides has the shape on page 7? What time does the clock on page 4 show? How many rows of data has the table on page 9? They have to go and look. Sixteen of the twenty-one kinds of drawing have a question like this, and so does every table; the remaining few have no single value worth reading back, and the screen says so rather than pretending otherwise.

    If the answer they read disagrees with the drawing, they are told so and asked to think again — but they are not locked out, because they may simply have miscounted, and a check that accuses honest people is a check people learn to work around. The "it does not match" button is never gated at all: saying no is always one click.

  4. No verdict can be recorded against a page nobody looked at

    Both buttons stay dead until the page image has actually appeared on screen. If it fails to load, the panel says the picture cannot be checked and offers rejection instead. There is no path where a question is confirmed against a blank space.

Editing a drawing cancels its check, automatically Approval is recorded against a fingerprint of the exact drawing that was on screen. Change one number in that drawing and the fingerprint moves, so the approval no longer refers to anything and the question goes back to needing a person. Nobody has to remember to undo it. There is no "confirmed" box that can be left ticked over content that has since changed.

What happens when a drawing is wrong

A wrong picture does not have to mean a lost question. The person checking it can open the same drawing editor you use when you write a question of your own, correct the shape, and save. Because it is the same editor, a repaired picture cannot end up shaped differently from one drawn from scratch — and because saving moves the fingerprint, the repair cancels its own approval and the picture has to be compared with the page again. Fixing it is never a way of skipping the check.

Tables cannot be repaired that way yet; a table read wrong is rejected, and the screen says so rather than offering a button that does not work.

Rejecting is always available and costs nothing. A paper has plenty of questions in it, and losing one to a diagram nobody could confirm is a much smaller problem than serving it.

Where an imported question ends up

A paper you import goes to your own library and nowhere else. There is no choice to make and no way to publish into the common library by accident — that is deliberate, because the common library reaches every child on Strivli, including children belonging to tutors who have never seen your paper. Both destinations are listed here so you can tell which one a question in front of you came from.

DestinationWho sees itWhat still has to happen
The common library
(Strivli's own imports)		 Every tutor and every child on Strivli. Nothing further. The library is rebuilt and the questions are live at each child's next session. Every picture in them has already been confirmed against its page — that is the gate, and there is no second one.
Your own library
(anything you import)		 Only your own students. They arrive as drafts, listed in Your own questions alongside anything you wrote yourself, each marked as not yet answered by you. Each one still needs its Answer Check before a pupil can be served it.

The two checks answer different questions and neither can stand in for the other. The Answer Check asks whether whoever wrote the question knows the right answer. That cannot catch a mis-read drawing, because the person doing it never saw the paper either: shown a heptagon labelled "how many sides?", they count seven, type seven, and are told they are correct. The drawing and the answer agree with each other and both are wrong. Only somebody holding the original page catches that.

If you meet a question you think is wrong

Open the topic from your library screen and hide the question. It stops appearing for your students immediately, nobody else's library changes, and you do not need anybody's agreement to do it. If you can spare thirty seconds, add a note of what looked wrong when you tell us — a drawing that got past a person is worth chasing down, and knowing which page it came from is usually enough to find it.

Do not edit the picture on an imported question If a question in your library came from a paper, the drawing is tied to the page it was confirmed against — and once it has reached you, that page is long gone. Change the drawing and the question can never be sent to your students again, with no obvious way back. Hide it and write your own alongside it instead. Editing the wording or the worked method is fine; it is only the picture that is pinned.

Questions people ask

Does it copy the questions word for word?
The wording comes from the paper's own text layer, so yes — deliberately. A question whose wording has drifted is a different question, and "close enough" is not a standard worth applying to something a child is marked on.
Am I paying for any of this?
No. Reading a paper costs Strivli about 16p and Strivli absorbs it. There is no import charge on your account and no figure in pounds for you to manage — only a count of papers, twenty a month, shown on the screen itself.
Can another tutor see the papers I upload, or the questions from them?
No. Your papers are stored separately from everybody else's, and questions from them go to your own library, which only your students receive. The scanned pages are kept only while you are reviewing the paper and are deleted with it.
I imported the wrong paper. Can I undo it?
Yes, while the questions are still drafts — there is an undo on the paper itself, and it takes them back out of your library. Once you have Answer-Checked one and sent it to your students it stays put; retire it individually from your library instead.
Can I upload a whole folder of papers at once?
Not yet, and deliberately so. The reader is not perfectly consistent — the same paper can come back with a different number of questions on a second run — which is fine when a person is reviewing one paper and much less fine across forty. One paper at a time is the honest pace for now.
Could a wrong question be sitting in the library right now?
It is possible, and pretending otherwise would be silly — every picture has been confirmed by a person against the page it came from, and people make mistakes. That is exactly why hiding a question is a one-click job that needs nobody's permission. If you spot one, hide it and tell us.
What about comprehension passages?
Not there. Passages are a copyright question rather than a technical one, and they need their own thinking.
My pupil says a diagram looks different from their book. Is it broken?
Probably not. Drawings are redrawn in Strivli's own style rather than reproduced, so a clock or a bar chart will look like Strivli's clock rather than the publisher's. What matters is whether it says the same thing — the same time, the same values, the same number of sides. If it does not, that is worth hiding and telling us about.
Can I offer my questions to the common library?
Yes — see Sharing your questions with every Strivli pupil below. Only questions that have settled in with your own pupils can be offered, and we read each one before anything is published.

Sharing your questions with every Strivli pupil

If a question of yours is working well, you can offer it to the common library so every tutor and every pupil on Strivli can be asked it. Open Your own questions and choose Share with Strivli.

Only settled-in questions can be offered, and that is the point A question qualifies once two things have happened: you answered it yourself and got it right, and then your own pupils met it enough times for it to behave like an ordinary question. That second part is evidence nothing else can produce — not our reading of it, and not yours. A question your pupils quietly get wrong never reaches the list.

  1. You confirm you have the right to share them

    Using a past paper with your own students and republishing it to every child on Strivli are different things, and they need different permission. Only you know which you hold, so you are asked to say so plainly, and we record that you did and when. If you are not sure, don't — questions you wrote yourself are always safe to offer.

  2. We read every question before anything is published

    We see how your pupils actually did on each one, who confirmed any picture and when, and whether it duplicates something already in the library. We may take some and leave others.

    What we cannot do is re-check a picture against the original paper, because those page scans are deleted when the import finishes — they are working copies of somebody's copyrighted paper and keeping them would be wrong. So for an imported question with a diagram we are relying on your confirmation, which is exactly why your name is on it.

  3. If we publish it, your copy is retired

    Not deleted — retired, and it stays in your library history. Your pupils now receive the question from the common library like everyone else, which is why it does not need to be in two places. They will not notice anything.

You can take an offer back at any point before we have decided. Once it is published it belongs to the common library, and pulling it back is our job rather than a button on your screen — ask us.

There is no obligation, and nothing changes if you never do it. Your questions are yours; this exists because a good question is worth more than one classroom.

How long we keep your uploaded papers

When you import a paper we keep the PDF and the page images we render from it for 90 days, then delete them automatically. The questions themselves are not affected — those are yours and stay in your library.

Ninety days is chosen so you can reopen and re-review a whole term's imports if you need to: the undo path on a committed paper needs the original page images to compare a redrawn diagram against. After that the working copy of somebody else's copyrighted paper has served its purpose and there is no good reason for us to still hold it.

A paper you are still reviewing is never removed The clock only applies once a paper is finished, cancelled or failed. A paper sitting in review is one you have not got to yet, however long it has been there, and it stays until you decide.

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