Frequently Asked Questions

Alma is an AI study platform for medical students, nursing students, nurse practitioners and physician assistants. You bring the material your program actually assigned: lecture slides, course readings, your own notes. Alma turns it into practice questions, flashcards on a spaced-repetition schedule, mind maps, a knowledge graph and simulated patients.

Every question comes from your own material.

Four audiences, each with its own page:

• Medical students (MD and DO) preparing for USMLE Step 1, Step 2 CK, COMLEX and shelf exams

• Nurses and nursing students working toward the NCLEX-RN or NCLEX-PN, and sitting HESI and ATI along the way

• Nurse practitioners preparing for AANP or ANCC certification around a full clinical week

• Physician assistants across the didactic year, end-of-rotation exams and the PANCE

Every audience gets the same tools. The exam on your profile decides how the questions are written.

From whatever you upload: a lecture PDF, a set of slides, a guideline or your own notes. The questions are written from that document, not from a pool.

They follow the style of the exam on your profile. Every question explains the correct option and each wrong one.

Alma keeps a running estimate of how well you know each topic, from your flashcard reviews, your quiz answers and the marks from your practice stations. You can see it, and delete it, under What Alma knows about you.

Flashcards come back on a schedule based on how well you recalled them. You can build a quiz from the questions you got wrong, or from the topics you haven't touched. The mind map and knowledge graph are built from your own notes, not a fixed curriculum.

FSRS (Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler), the algorithm Anki now offers. It models how your memory fades, and it's generally more accurate than older schedulers like SM-2. Cards you struggle with come back sooner. Cards you know well wait longer. You choose the retention you want, from 70 to 97 percent.

Yes. That's the main thing it does. Upload a lecture PDF, a review paper or a set of slides. You can make exam-style questions with explanations, a mind map, and a slide deck you can edit and export to PowerPoint.

For flashcards from the same material, use Import from Learning Hub on the Flashcards page.

The Notebook is where you write your own notes. Take notes during a lecture or on rotation, or dictate with the mic. From the notes you can make illustrations, flashcards, mind maps, data tables and a knowledge graph.

To ask a question about what you wrote, ask Alma. She searches your notes, your Learning Hub sources and your flashcards, and cites what she finds.

A practice OSCE station you run in your browser. You take the history from an AI patient, then work through the exam, tests, diagnosis and plan with an AI examiner. At the end you see the diagnosis, your marks and case notes.

You type your own questions to the patient instead of reading a vignette, so you decide what to ask. It's practice for OSCEs, end-of-rotation exams and the clinical-reasoning part of certification exams.

Several more tools:

• Knowledge graph: links the concepts across your notebooks

• Podcasts: a library of human-hosted shows sorted by topic, plus AI-voiced episodes you can make from your own notes (rolling out, so it's on for some accounts first)

• Games: quiz-show, detective and platformer games built from your own material

• Schedule: a day-by-day plan to your exam date

• Books: a PDF reader with Alma beside it

Yes. Every plan starts with a one-week free trial, and you aren't charged if you cancel before it ends. The pricing page lists what each plan includes.

Yes. Schools and programs (medical, nursing, NP and PA) can license the platform for all their students, with a faculty admin view. Pricing is per institution, not self-serve. Get in touch through the support page and we'll walk through what onboarding looks like.

No. Your notes, uploads, questions and queries aren't used to train, fine-tune or improve any AI model, ours or a third party's. Our agreements with the model providers we use prohibit them from training on content sent through their APIs. Your material is used to run the Service for you and nothing else. The privacy policy lists which providers process what.

It stays the institution's. It isn't shared across organizations, isn't used for training, and isn't visible to users outside the institution's account. The institution sets retention, deletion and access rights for accounts under its subscription.