So I just graduated with my bachelor’s in science majoring in computer science from UBC, and something I struggled a lot with was how to actually learn. I think it’s kind of funny how in all the years of education from secondary to post-secondary, we’re never taught how to learn… like we’re just meant to figure this out??? Worse, some naturally have deeper processing while others don’t, which leads to a lot of self esteem issues for the latter.
In my experience, doing “ok” in courses is actually hard. I’m either doing very well and headed for a 90%+ or I don’t know anything and might just fail the course. This reached its boiling point in my last year of university when I was balancing working on my own startup with a full course load. After bombing a quiz, I went online searching for solutions and signed up for the iCanStudy program by Justin Sung. Although I didn’t get too far, I picked up just enough to do well in my courses with minimal time inputted!
I signed up for the iCanStudy program in September 2025, and started using Claude Code (the same engine behind Cowork) around the same time. Naturally, I applied the techniques I picked up within Claude Code and it worked very well. Techniques like spaced repetition and taking in content in different forms (practice questions, diagrams, simpler explanations) just so happen to overlap with what Claude Code is good at.
Alright, enough yapping. Here are my grades from my last year (2 semesters) of university:
For context, I worked 10 hours 3x a week during this period and used a version of the system that I explain below for COSC 328, COSC 320, and COSC 414 (the other two are capstone and a project-based course).
So how does it work?
1. The folder is the memory
Every course gets its own folder: lecture slides, syllabus, every past quiz and practice exam, assignments, and any emails from the prof. At the top of the folder sits a file called CLAUDE.md, which Claude Code reads at the start of every session.
CLAUDE.md holds everything a tutor would need to know: the exam format, what the prof said is on it, the topics I keep getting wrong, the topics I’ve locked in, and how I like to be taught. Nothing lives in my head or in a chat I’ll lose. I can skip a week, open the folder, and Claude picks up where we left off.
COSC 414/
CLAUDE.md the brain
StudyPlan_Final.md
Progress.md
CourseContent_L1-3.md
ReviewSheet_Final.txt
Lectures/
Example Questions/
Quizzes/
Archive/2. Teach from the prof’s slides
This one has the clearest proof behind it. For my COSC 414 midterm, I had Claude teach me from summaries of the lectures, and I got 49%. After that I switched to having it teach from the actual slides, and I got 100% on Quiz 4.
Now Claude reads the real lecture PDFs a few slides at a time, in order, while I follow along on the same slides on a second monitor. One idea per message, then a quick check before moving on. Pages the prof said are excluded get skipped, and so do code slides if the course only tests concepts. Everything else gets taught.
It also uses the prof’s own method and notation, checked against the prof’s example questions. In 414 the prof tested the setup and never the arithmetic, so I practised writing out the matrices without multiplying them. Anything Claude pulls from outside the slides has to be labelled as such. Early on it taught me a lighting model from the textbook (Blinn-Phong) that was never on the slides, and that cost me a whole session.
3. Every session opens with a quiz
Before anything new, Claude quizzes me for 10 to 15 minutes on whatever is due, no notes. Every topic in the course has a mastery score from 0 to 5 in a file called Progress.md, and the score sets when the topic comes back:
0, New: review now
1, Introduced: in 1 day
2, Familiar: in 3 days
3, Confident: in 7 days
4, Mastered: in 14 days
5, Locked in: in 30 days
Get it right and the score goes up, so the topic stays away longer. Get it wrong and it comes back sooner. That’s spaced repetition, and it’s tedious to track by hand for every topic in three courses. Claude does the bookkeeping, so all I have to do is show up.
Questions come the way the exam would ask them, with no hints like “which pattern is this?” I write the answer and Claude checks it. Saying “yeah I get it” doesn’t get me out of the reps.
4. Practice like the real test
This one depends on your course. If past exams exist, they’re the most valuable thing in the folder. Claude catalogues every question in them one by one: what it tested and where it showed up again.
In COSC 320 (algorithms), the prof took “inspiration” from past final questions, and 2 of the 4 questions on the second midterm came from them. In COSC 414, every practice question showed up on the midterm, often one level harder.
Then I practise timed, the way I’ll write the exam. Claude writes a quiz into a text file, I type my answers in, and it reviews them. Every miss goes into a weak-spots table and decides what the next session opens with.
5. The system updates itself
Every session ends with the same checklist:
Mark the session done
Log what clicked and what didn’t
Move the mastery scores
Add to the cheat sheet
Update the weak-spot table
Save any corrections as rules
Then Claude lists every file it touched, so I can see nothing got skipped.
The rules are the part that compounds. Any time Claude did something that didn’t work for me, I told it, and it saved the fix. Over one term that added up to about 40 rules, like “one concept per message” and “screenshots, never ASCII”. That second one came from a midterm question I lost after studying from an ASCII diagram Claude drew in place of the actual slide.
The files
Six files do the work, and Claude keeps all of them updated:
CLAUDE.md: the brain, read at the start of every session.
StudyPlan.md: the schedule and a log of every session.
Progress.md: mastery scores and review dates.
CourseContent.md: the course, in the prof’s words, filled in as lectures are taught.
ReviewSheet.txt: formulas, traps and mnemonics. Grows every session and becomes the cheat sheet.
Quizzes/DayN.txt: Claude writes the questions, I type the answers.
Set it up yourself
The file attached to this post is the setup guide. It’s the instructions Claude follows to build all of this for a new course.
Fill a folder with everything from the course: slides, syllabus, past quizzes, assignments, prof emails.
Drop AI-Study-System-Setup.pdf into the folder.
Open Claude Code in that folder and paste this:
Read AI-Study-System-Setup.pdf and set up the study system for this course.
Claude asks you a few questions first (exam format and date, whether you get a cheat sheet, how many hours you realistically have), reads the whole folder, and builds the files. From then on you just gotta show up :)
How are you using AI?
Comment below and let me know. Alternatively, come chat with me.