A not-for-profit educational resource centre · Toronto, Ontario · Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM–5:00 PM ET
Examit is an independent, not-for-profit educational resource centre. We publish study guides, learning roadmaps, practice materials and academic toolkits for students and adult learners, and we make all of it free to read and free to print. We teach nobody, assess nobody and sell nothing. The collection is the work.
Examit began in a borrowed room at a Toronto public library branch in the autumn of 2009. Two secondary-school teachers and a university librarian had noticed the same thing from three different angles: learners were not short of information, they were short of method. Students arrived at the reference desk able to find twelve sources and unable to decide which two mattered. They could recite a chapter and not answer a question about it.
The first material was a photocopied twelve-page booklet on note-taking and revision, printed at cost and left on a shelf by the door. Four hundred copies went in six weeks. The website followed in 2011, largely because reprinting was becoming expensive.
Three volunteers, one borrowed room, twelve photocopied pages on note-taking. No name yet; the booklet simply said “study notes” on the cover.
Forty guides published online. The name Examit was chosen because the work is about getting through examinations and out the other side, not about examinations themselves.
Registered as a not-for-profit in Ontario. A small grant funded one part-time editorial post. The collection reached 120 guides.
Learners kept asking for the worksheets that accompanied the workshops. Printable materials became a permanent part of the collection rather than handouts.
After a decade of informal practice, we wrote down how guides are researched, reviewed and revised — and committed to reviewing every item annually.
Structured pathways replaced the flat list of guides. The mature-learner advisory group formed after a year in which enrolment among adult learners rose sharply.
The whole site and every printable were rebuilt to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA, tested with volunteers using screen readers and keyboard navigation.
412 guides, 68 printable materials, six study paths, forty-one volunteer mentors, and the same Bloor Street reading room we moved into in 2018.
To make good study method available to anyone who wants it, without cost, registration or condition.
That sentence carries more weight than it might appear to. Study skill is distributed very unevenly, and not by ability. Learners whose parents attended university tend to arrive knowing how a seminar works, what “critically evaluate” means and that asking a librarian is normal. Learners without that background often spend a year discovering the same things by trial and error, and some do not get the year.
None of this knowledge is secret or difficult. It is simply unevenly transmitted. Writing it down clearly and giving it away is a small intervention, but it is one we can actually make.
The gap we work on is not a gap in intelligence or effort. It is a gap in knowing how the thing is done. From the 2019 statement of purpose
Six commitments that govern what we publish and how.
Every item in the collection goes through the same process. We publish it here so you can judge how much weight to give what you read.
We name studies rather than gesturing at “studies show”. We distinguish between findings replicated across laboratories and single results, however striking. We report effect sizes in plain language rather than as percentages that sound larger than they are. Where a finding has failed to replicate, we say so even if we previously published it approvingly.
Errors are corrected in place, with a dated note at the foot of the page describing what changed. We do not edit substantively without disclosure. If we withdraw a guide, it stays reachable with a notice explaining why, because readers may have printed it and deserve to know it was retired.
We accept no sponsored content, no paid placements, no affiliate links and no advertising. We are not affiliated with any examination board, institution, publisher or educational technology company, and we do not accept funding from organizations selling products to learners. Where we mention an external service, we have no financial relationship with it.
Corrections from readers are the cheapest quality control we have, and we would rather receive a blunt email than publish an error for another year. Write to info@examit.club with the call number and what is wrong.
Three ideas run underneath everything in the collection.
Learners consistently prefer study methods that feel smooth and consistently learn more from methods that feel hard. Retrieval feels worse than re-reading. Spacing feels worse than massing. Mixed practice feels worse than blocked practice. In each case the uncomfortable option produces better retention. We therefore try to be honest that our advice will make your study sessions feel less pleasant, and to explain why that is the point rather than a flaw.
Almost every study system collapses in the same way: a week goes badly, the plan falls behind, and the learner concludes the plan was wrong rather than that the week was. We design our materials to expect this. Every planner has slack in it. Every path can be re-dated. The recovery instructions are as prominent as the setup instructions, because recovery is the part that gets used.
We publish suggestions, not prescriptions. A parent studying between shifts, a graduate student with an office, and a seventeen-year-old preparing for provincial examinations have genuinely different constraints, and no method survives contact with a life it was not designed for. Where we give a rule, we try to explain the reasoning behind it so you can adapt it sensibly rather than follow or abandon it.
Six staff, one advisory group, and forty-one volunteer mentors.
Director and founding editor. Formerly a secondary-school science teacher and later a curriculum adviser for an Ontario school board. Doctorate in education, University of Toronto, on assessment practice in senior science. Writes the study methods shelf and chairs the annual review cycle.
Senior editor, research and writing. Academic librarian for eleven years at a Québec university before joining the centre. Responsible for the research skills and academic writing shelves, the citation reference, and the reading lists.
Editor, critical thinking and digital learning. Background in philosophy and in instructional design for online programmes. Built the argument mapping exercises and leads our work on generative tools in study.
Learner support and community programmes. Runs the enquiry desk, the reading circles and the volunteer mentor network. Previously a college learning-strategies adviser in Ottawa.
Accessibility lead. Certified in accessible document design; coordinates alternative formats, the annual accessibility audit and the volunteer testing panel. Handles all format requests personally.
Production and publishing. Maintains the site, the print layouts and the call-number catalogue. Responsible for the fact that every worksheet fits on one page.
Eleven volunteers meet twice a year to review the collection from outside: three secondary teachers, two academic librarians, two college learning-strategies advisers, three adult learners currently studying part time, and one accessibility consultant. The group has a standing brief to tell us what we have got wrong, and has done so usefully on several occasions — the entire adult-learner shelf exists because of them.
Forty-one volunteers answer study-skills questions by email, generally within two business days. They are teachers, librarians, graduate students and retired academics. Mentors do not review assignments, mark work, or help with anything a course would consider assessed. If you would like to volunteer, write to the community desk at info@examit.club.
Examit is a registered not-for-profit in Ontario. Our costs are modest: six part-time salaries, a small office, hosting and printing. Funding comes from three sources: a recurring grant from a private educational foundation, project grants for specific work such as the 2024 accessibility rebuild, and individual donations, most of them small and many from people who used the collection years ago.
We do not accept funding from organizations that sell products or services to learners, including publishers, tutoring companies, educational technology firms and examination preparation businesses. That constraint costs us money and is not negotiable; the collection is useful precisely because nobody has paid to influence it.
Annual financial statements are available on request from info@examit.club.