Get set up in five minutes

Semester is a calm home for your whole term. Add your courses once, and your tasks, classes, exams, grades, notes and flashcards all hang off them.

1. Create your account

Sign up at yoursemester.com/signup with an email and password, then confirm your address from the email we send you. A short welcome helps you add your first courses. Everything syncs to your account, so it is the same on your phone, your laptop and the desktop app. Your data is always yours.

2. Add your courses first

Open Grades and add each course with its code (like CS 342), name, credits and a color. Everything else links back to a course: your classes, exams, tasks, notes and flashcards. That keeps colors and grades tied together across the whole app.

3. Build out your week

Add your classes with their days and times, drop in tasks with due dates, and log your exam dates. Your Home page then shows exactly what today looks like.

4. Make it yours

In Settings → Appearance, choose a light, dark or auto theme (auto can switch on a schedule you set) and an accent color. Time & units sets your clock, your temperature and distance units, and the first day of your week.

Install it like an app

Semester runs in any modern browser, and it installs to your home screen for a native feel: full screen, its own icon and an instant launch. If your connection drops while it’s open, it keeps working and syncs back up when you reconnect.

• iPhone / iPad: open Semester in Safari, tap the Share button, then Add to Home Screen.
• Android: open it in Chrome, tap the menu (three dots), then Install app or Add to Home screen.
• Windows: get the Semester desktop app. It opens in its own window and stays in sync with your phone. See the desktop app for what it adds.
• Mac: the Mac app is on the way. Until then Semester works in any browser; pin the tab to keep it one click away.

Getting around

• On a computer or an iPad: every page is in the sidebar on the left.
• On a phone: the bar at the bottom has Home, Tasks, Calendar, a shortcut and More. The shortcut starts as Focus and then becomes the page you last opened from More. More opens every page as a grid of icons.
• Hold the bottom bar and slide your finger along it to pick a tab, then let go.

The Home page

Home is your daily glance: four numbers, then your day and your week, each kind of thing in its own color.

• Four numbers: your study streak, your GPA, your open tasks and your next exam. Tap one to see what is behind it: your study history, your courses and their grades, every open task (tick them off right there), and every exam ahead with its countdown.
• Today: one list in time order. Anything late comes first, then your classes, exams, events and the tasks due today, with what is on now (or next) at the top.
• Coming up: the next seven days at a glance, and what is on each of them.
• Weather for your location, so you know whether to bring a jacket to that 9am.
• Your week: a recap of your week. See Your week & Wrapped.

Tasks

Capture everything you have to do, with as much or as little detail as you like.

Adding a task

• Give it a title, a due date (and a time, if it has one), a priority (low, medium or high), and optionally a course so it takes that course’s color.
• Tasks with a due date show a friendly countdown (Today, Tomorrow, in 3 days) and appear on your Home page and in your Calendar.

Finishing and tidying up

• Check a task off to complete it. In Task options on the Tasks page, completed tasks can auto-delete after 1, 3, 7, 14 or 30 days, or you can clear them all at once, so your list never piles up. Finished tasks still count in your weekly recap and Wrapped after they are cleared.
• Sort your list by due date or by priority, and click any task to open the full editor. A deleted task comes back with Undo for a few seconds.
• Link a task to a focus session to track exactly how long you have spent on it.

Classes & schedule

Your weekly timetable, color coded by course.

• Add a class with its course, a title (Lecture, Lab, Tutorial), a room, the day or days it meets, and a start and end time down to the minute.
• Pick several weekdays at once for a class that repeats, like a Monday, Wednesday and Friday lecture.
• The Classes page shows each day’s lineup, with every day’s classes as dots in their courses’ colors on its tab. The class happening right now is highlighted, with how far along it is, so you always know where to be.
• Classes flow straight into your Home page and your Calendar.

Calendar & events

One place for classes, exams, tasks and your own plans, in a week, month or agenda view.

• Your classes, exams and due tasks appear by themselves. On top of those, add your own events with a time, an end time, a location, a color and notes.
• Overlapping events stack neatly side by side. Tap a stack to pick the one you want.
• In the month view, tap a day to see everything on it and add an event right there.
• On a keyboard, press W, M or A to switch between the week, month and agenda views.
• Bring in your school’s calendar from Settings → Data → Import a calendar: a Canvas, Google or Outlook file, or a link that keeps itself up to date.

Exams

Keep every midterm and final in view, with the next one front and center.

• Log an exam with its date, time, room and duration.
• The Next up banner shows your closest exam with a big day counter, and each exam in the list has its own countdown.
• Once an exam passes, it moves into a separate Passed exams section, so what is coming never gets buried under what is done.

Grades & GPA

Know exactly where you stand in every course, and across your whole degree.

Course grades

• Add grade items for a course, for example “Midterm: 30%” or “Final: 40%”, each with a weight and (once you have it) a score.
• Your course percentage and letter grade work themselves out as a weighted average, and update the moment you enter a new score.
• Open any course to see its hub: the current grade, your grade goal, the focus time you have logged on it, and its tasks, exams, notes and flashcards.

GPA

• Semester tracks your term GPA and your cumulative GPA, weighted by credits, including past terms you add to your history.
• Retaking a course? Mark it as a retake. Its first grade keeps counting until the new one has a grade, and then the new grade replaces the old one in your GPA.
• A course that shouldn’t count (added by mistake, withdrawn or never taken) can be left out of your GPA.
• Using a different scale? Change the letters, their thresholds and their points in Settings → Grading scale.

Grade goals

Set a target and see what it will take to hit it.

• On a course hub, choose the letter you are aiming for. Semester shows the range your final grade can land in and the average you need on the work that is left.
• A clear badge shows whether you are on track, at risk, already secured, or whether the goal is out of reach, along with the best score still possible.

Finishing a term

When a term ends, open the term menu on Grades and choose Finish. Its GPA goes into your history, and the next term starts fresh.

• Home, Tasks, Classes, Exams and the Calendar then show only the new term. Tasks that weren’t done go with the old term.
• Nothing is lost: Grades, course hubs, notes and flashcards keep everything from past terms.
• Coming from another app? Add your earlier terms under Past terms in the same menu, so your cumulative GPA is right from day one.

Focus timer

A quiet place to actually do the work. Pick a mode, link a task or a course if you like, and press play.

• Pomodoro: focus blocks with short and long breaks. Set the lengths, and how many focus blocks earn a long break.
• Timer: a countdown you set, or a stopwatch that counts up until you finish (up to 8 hours).
• Flight: study until you land somewhere real. See Focus Flight.
• A session counts once it reaches 5 minutes. Counted focus builds your streak and your daily minutes, and shows up on Home, your course hubs and your weekly recap.
• Paused for 5 minutes or more? You can save the minutes you have done instead of losing them.
• Go fullscreen for a distraction-free clock, with an optional music visualizer that moves with your microphone, or with your computer’s own sound.
• A session running on one device shows on your other devices too. Pause or stop it on the device it started on.
• The timer keeps accurate time even when the tab is in the background, and plays a soft chime when a block ends. In Settings → Focus & privacy you can keep the screen awake, get a notification when a block ends, and turn on a gentle reminder to stand up and drink some water after an hour of focus without a break.

Focus Flight

A fun way to focus: pick a real place in the world to fly to, and study until you land.

• Pick a real airport to fly to. The flight takes as long as your focus session, and you watch your plane cross the globe while you work.
• Every landing adds a stamp to your passport, with the cities and countries you have reached.
• For a longer study goal, plan a trip with layovers: several flights in a row, with a rest at each stop.
• Need to stop early? Divert and land where you are. Your minutes still count, as long as you flew for at least 5 of them.

Challenges

Study with your friends, a little competitively.

• Start a challenge, then share its code or link. Friends join with the code, and everyone sees the standings.
• Pick a goal: Most focus, a Race to a number of hours, a Streak duel (the longest run of days with at least 25 minutes of focus), a Daily goal, or Frequent flyer for the most kilometers or countries on Focus flights.
• A challenge lasts 3 days, a week, 2 weeks or a month. Results are final an hour after it ends.

Flashcards

Cards that come back right before you would forget them.

• Make a deck for a topic. It can start empty: add question and answer cards now or whenever you like. Link a deck to a course, and keep decks together in folders.
• Study: think of the answer, show it, then rate how it went: Again, Hard, Good or Easy. On a phone you can swipe instead.
• Smart review learns how fast you forget from your own reviews, then brings each card back just before you would lose it, and a little sooner as that course’s exam gets close. It all happens on your device.
• A deck’s Options set how many new cards come in a day (Smart, by time, or a number you pick) and how much to review (Relaxed, Balanced or Intense).

Notes & notebooks

Text notes

• Write with simple formatting: headings, lists, checklists, toggles, callouts, quotes, code, highlights and math. Type / on an empty line for every kind of block, and @ to mention a day, an exam or a task.
• Link notes to each other and see how they connect in the Graph. Link a note to a course and it shows up in that course’s hub.
• Flip to the read view for a clean page, and keep notes in folders (a folder can hold folders).

Notebooks

• Handwrite on lined or dotted pages with an Apple Pencil, a stylus or a mouse, with a pen, a pencil, a highlighter, an eraser, shapes, typed text, a lasso to move things and a laser pointer for showing. Pages can be light or dark.
• Bring in a PDF, GoodNotes, Notability or OneNote notebook to write on, and export any notebook as a PDF.

Study rooms

Study together in real time, whether your group is across the hall or across the country. Rooms open on an iPad or a computer.

• Find or make a room: join a public room from the lobby, or make a private one that people join with its code or an invite link.
• Talk and present: voice chat is built in, for up to 9 people on the mic at once, and screen sharing puts your screen on the wall so you can walk your group through a problem.
• Work side by side: one shared whiteboard with the notebook tools, a chat, a group timer that runs for everyone at once (a countdown or a Pomodoro), and a group to-do list next to your own tasks. Raise a hand when you have a question.
• Run the room: the owner and admins choose who can talk, share a screen, draw on the board, send messages and edit the group list. Members can vote to remove someone straight away.

Your week & Wrapped

• Your week: every week, a recap on Home sums up your focus, the tasks you finished, the cards you reviewed, your notes and the exams ahead.
• Semester Wrapped: at the end of a term, a look back at the whole thing (your best week, your favorite day to study, your longest focus and your courses), with an image to share.

Settings

• Account: your email and password, the welcome to watch again, the tutorial, and a way to send us feedback.
• Appearance: a light, dark or auto theme (auto can flip at times you set), an accent color, and Effects, which can switch off blur on a phone that lags.
• Time & units: a 12 or 24 hour clock, Celsius or Fahrenheit, kilometers or miles, and whether your week starts on Sunday or Monday.
• Focus & privacy: keep the screen awake during focus, timer alerts, move and water reminders, and Hide grades, which blurs your grades and GPA until you click them (handy on a shared screen).
• Grading scale: the letters and points your school uses.
• Data: backups, calendar import and export, the grade report, and resetting or deleting your account. See Backups & exports.

Sync & devices

With an account, Semester keeps everything in sync across your phone, tablet and laptop. Start a task on one device and finish it on another. Changes save instantly and merge safely, and if your connection drops the app keeps working with a copy on your device, then catches up the moment you are back online. A focus session running on one device shows on the others too.

The desktop app

On Windows, the desktop app gives Semester its own window and taskbar icon, and always runs the newest version. On top of the web app it adds:

• Day glance: a quiet card at the edge of your screen with what is next (classes, tasks and exams), and small reminders about 15 minutes before a class, a timed event or an exam. Set it up in Settings → Day glance.
• A shortcut for your day: press Ctrl+Alt+G (or your own combo) any time, even with Semester in the background, and the glance pops up.
• Your computer’s sound for the timer’s music visualizer, and screen sharing in study rooms without browser prompts.

Backups & exports

All of these live in Settings → Data.

• Backup: Export saves all your data as one file. Import restores it on any device, replacing what is in Semester now.
• Grade report: a clean, printable report of your courses, grades and GPA, ready to print or save as a PDF.
• Calendar export: your classes and exams as an .ics file for Google, Apple or Outlook Calendar.
• Import a calendar: classes, exams and deadlines from Canvas, Google or Outlook.

Privacy

Your work stays yours. Semester stores only what it needs to run your account, never sells your data, and lets you export or delete everything at any time. In Settings → Data, Reset all data erases everything and starts you fresh while keeping your account, and Delete account removes your account and everything in it, on every device. For the full details, read the Privacy Policy.

Troubleshooting

My changes are not showing on another device

Make sure you are signed in with the same account on both, and that you are online. Changes sync within a few seconds; a quick refresh forces a fresh pull.

I can’t hear anyone, or my screen share won’t connect, in a study room

Allow the microphone when your browser asks (or in its site settings if you said no before). In the desktop app, if Windows asks about private networks, choose Allow. If it still won’t connect, the networks may not allow a direct link: switching to another network, like your phone’s hotspot, usually fixes it.

The desktop app doesn’t show the newest features

Press Ctrl+R in the app. It always loads the latest Semester, and new versions of the app itself install on their own.

The music visualizer is not moving

It needs permission to hear audio. For the microphone, allow mic access and play music out loud. For your computer’s sound in a browser, pick a tab or your whole screen and tick the “share audio” box when asked; the desktop app asks for it directly.

I forgot my password

Use Forgot password? on the log in page and follow the email.