About Mento

Mento is a small, independent study tool. It turns material you already have — your lecture notes, a PDF, a set of slides — into practice questions, mock exams and spaced review, so that studying becomes something you do rather than something you read.

What it is built on

Mento is opinionated about method, and the opinions come from the research rather than from what is easiest to sell. Three of them shape most of the product:

Retrieval beats review. Practice questions come with graduated hints instead of a reveal button, because a hint you had to work with still counts as retrieving the answer and a revealed answer does not.

Spacing beats cramming. Problems you solve return on a widening schedule rather than disappearing, because the gap between attempts is doing the work.

Learning styles are not a thing. Mento will never ask whether you are a visual learner, because matching teaching to a self-reported style has been tested repeatedly and does not improve outcomes. We wrote about why that idea persists anyway.

What it is not

It is not a way to have your assignments written for you. Mento’s terms are explicit that submitting its output as your own work for academic credit is not permitted, and most institutions treat it as misconduct.

It is also not infallible. It is built on large language models, which produce confident and occasionally wrong answers, and it can misread your material. How Mento uses AI sets out where it is used and what it gets wrong. If you are studying for something that matters, check it against your source.

Who writes the guides

The guides are published under the Mento name. Every empirical claim in them carries a citation to the original study, including the claims that argue against features we could otherwise have sold. Where the evidence is weak or contested, we say so rather than rounding it up.

Contact

Questions, problems, or corrections to anything published here: raymund@mento.cloud, or the contact form. Corrections to a guide are genuinely welcome — if something here misstates a finding, we would rather fix it than keep the traffic.