6 ways AI can help you ace finals – for free (without plagiarizing)

Final exams are stressful for students, requiring intense studying and long nights. However, AI can help ease the load. 

Since generative AI first surged in popularity, the technology has typically received a bad rap in the education sector, with many believing it threatens academic standards and integrity. However, AI can also be a great assistant capable of helping students optimize their studying. This is especially true as AI tools become better and smarter. 

Also: The tasks college students are using Claude AI for most 

Most generative AI tools, such as AI chatbots, are intuitive to use, requiring no knowledge of coding or AI, and many of the most helpful features are free. If you’re ready to hand off some tedious studying tasks to AI, I rounded up the best ways you can use AI to sort through all of your notes and ace your finals.

Quick Note: For any of the below tips that include AI chatbots, you can use whichever one you choose, and there are plenty of options to pick from, which we break down here. 

Free AI tools

Before we start, you’ll want to select an AI chatbot. Many free AI chatbots exist, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, and Perplexity. However, if you are using the AI for studying and cramming, there is some value to the premium plans, such as higher limits and access to more advanced features. The good news is that students can access some of these subscriptions free of charge.   

Google is giving US students free access to Google’s One AI Premium Plan just in time for finals. Students who enroll before June 30 will receive free access through spring 2026. OpenAI launched a similar promotion, offering US students free access to ChatGPT Plus until the end of May. These subscriptions are typically $20 monthly, so this is a great deal. 

1. Essay help

As if cramming a semester’s worth of material for an exam wasn’t difficult enough, many professors also assign end-of-semester papers that either replace or supplement your final exam. Because of how much they are weighted in terms of your grade, they often require high levels of synthesis and research. That’s where AI can help. 

You use it to support your writing, including creating essay outlines, finding sources, and brainstorming essay ideas.  

Also: How ChatGPT (and other AI chatbots) can help you write an essay

To have an AI chatbot help with any of these tasks, all you have to do is make your request conversationally, such as, “Help me create an outline for an essay regarding the rise and fall of The Wiggles.” 

You can also leverage AI chatbots’ advanced natural language processing to co-edit essays for you. Unlike your standard spell-check tools, AI chatbots can understand context, flow, conciseness, and more, making them a superior editor. Copy and paste your text and ask the chatbot to edit for whatever focus you’d like. 

Also: Why Canvas is ChatGPT’s best productivity feature for power users

There’s also the option of having the essay written for you. However, passing off someone else’s material as your own is considered plagiarism. Think people won’t notice? AI detection tools are getting extremely accurate, with ZDNET’s testing identifying some tools detecting plagiarism correctly 100% of the time.  

2. Outline your notes 

In preparation for exams, you face the difficult task of looking through a semester’s worth of notes and condensing them to the most important highlights for studying. Instead of doing that yourself, you can ask an AI chatbot to summarize or organize your notes for you.

Earning a degree involves lots of reading. Whether a humanities or STEM major, you must read or familiarize yourself with research papers, textbook entries, slide decks, and long-winded articles loaded with technical jargon and hard to parse. You can simply feed that content to the AI chatbot and ask for a summary. 

For example, as a political science major, I had many separate Google Docs notes from various lectures. If AI chatbots had been available, I could have copied and pasted that text into any AI chatbot and asked it to generate concise summaries with higher-level points of view. 

Also: 35% of college students are using AI tools to help them with their studies

For the sake of this article, I copied and pasted my latest ZDNET article into Copilot and asked it to write a summary, as seen below. Within seconds, it organized my article into six main points that were accurate, easy to read, and, most importantly, easy to parse. 

If your professor shares notes, outlines, or other course materials, you can also ask an AI chatbot to summarize those. Most chatbots — including Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot — support image and file uploads. Higher upload limits are typically limited to the premium plans, but as I noted earlier, students can now access some of these subscriptions for free. 

3. Create podcasts from your notes

Google’s NotebookLM Audio Overviews feature allows users to import any content they have and create an engaging podcast featuring two AI hosts discussing their notes. This can come in especially handy if you are trying to maximize your studying time, listening to your notes and test materials in a conversational way while you are doing other tasks such as cooking, working out, taking a walk, or commuting. 

It is also helpful because, as discussed above, many materials students encounter are dense and complicated. The conversation between both AI hosts is very conversational, includes tangible examples, and ad libs that make the content much more digestible and less intimidating. Google released a feature recently allowing users to create podcasts in over 50 languages, even if the original content was in a different language. 

4. Dumbing down material 

Sometimes, no matter how often you read or study certain material, it simply doesn’t click. In those instances, you can use an AI chatbot to break down complex terms for you into more digestible parts that meet you where you are. 

For example, you can input a sentence or broader concept you don’t understand and ask the chatbot to explain it at a level that makes the material more understandable. My go-to is, “Explain XYZ as if I were a five-year-old,” as seen in the photo below. 

Also: The best free AI courses (and whether AI certificates are worth it)

This feature is so helpful that I use it often in my daily work. It breaks the subject down using everyday, tangible examples and adds context that makes the material much more accessible, cutting through confusing and technical terminology. You can pick any age or grade level you’d like. 

My favorite way to use AI voice assistants is to ask them to explain a topic I don’t understand. I enjoy doing this because I can interrupt it midway with follow-up questions and explain my confusion about conversationally. Typically, when I am confused about a topic, I don’t even know where to begin. Being able to ramble and go on a tangent to explain my confusion is super helpful. 

5. Visualize your notes

Most AI chatbots today are multimodal. This means that they not only accept inputs of different kinds but can also generate images. ChatGPT recently got an update with GPT-4o image generation that significantly improved its image quality. It can now produce realistic images and text as well as charts and other graphics. 

Also: ChatGPT’s new image generator shattered my expectations – and now it’s free to try

If you are a visual learner, it might be helpful to use this feature to see a visual representation of the magnitude, such as graphs and diagrams that display the data you are looking at or go in-depth into the subject at hand. For example, I asked ChatGPT to create a labeled image of Photosynthesis, and it generated this: 

When learning history, I drew timelines to help me remember all the significant events. Now, you can ask ChatGPT to create that timeline. For example, I said, “Can you create a labeled timeline with the events leading up to the Revolutionary War?” Of course, this oversimplifies it, but it does illustrate all the different things the AI can do.   

6. Test your knowledge 

In grade school, my favorite studying technique was having my mom randomly test me on the material. Now, instead of relying on family or friends being awake during your midnight study sessions, you can use an AI chatbot to do the same thing for you. 

For example, you can ask the chatbot, “Can you test me on my exam material?” Then, the chatbot will ask you what the material is and generate questions based on the topic you share within seconds, as seen in the image below. 

Once you answer, it can correct you, provide insight into what you said wrong, and even suggest online resources to familiarize yourself with the material better. 

If you want to take this feature up a notch, you can use a chatbot with source reading capabilities, or paste your notes in and ask it to generate questions specific to your PDF or notes for you to answer. 

Also: AI agents arrive in US classrooms

You can also ask the chatbot to generate flashcards based on the material. The chatbot will tell you exactly what to add to the front and the back of the cards, so you can spend less time figuring out what to put on the cards and more time using them. 

Good luck with your finals! 

Want more stories about AI? Sign up for Innovation, our weekly newsletter.