How to organize a question bank with the Bear app (for Mac)

If you are a professor or intend to organize your own legal studies based on objective questions, there are basically two options. You can use some question platform (such as Qconcursos or Other competitors ) or you can follow an already prepared workbook, usually a printed or pdf material prepared by a course you attend.

In my view, the advantages offered by question platforms are very significant. After all, depending on the plan you subscribe to, it will be possible to set up mock exams, consult teacher comments, search based on filters, etc. And this is especially important if you are in a competitive environment, as is the case with preparation for public exams.

Aware of these advantages, I decided to strive to offer my students the possibility of preparing for the test (mine or other legal tests) with the help of these tools. Anyway Question platforms are an inexhaustible source of free content and they just needed to be adapted for my purpose.

The first step is naturally to copy and paste the questions from the platform of your choice, organizing this collection in some way.

The problem is that it is not enough to have the question bank. I also needed to have an environment in which I could take notes and plan the preparation of the tests. In addition, I needed a search tool to easily retrieve a question and the notes on the template. In other words, it was necessary to create a knowledge base. After trying several solutions, I ended up adopting the app Bear .

While the app is advertised as a generic tool built for the user to take notes (right column), ordered by a list (central column) and organized around tags (left column), my use had the following goal: to label each alternative of the questions so that I would be able to know exactly which articles of law would be charged in the entire test. My Bear was organized like this:

The best part about this organization is that it makes it possible to expand, in a tree format, the entire list of cited articles. Thus, I am sure that I am covering the content well, both in the correct and incorrect alternatives.

In summary, as a law professor, I chose to organize objective tests for students of all the subjects I teach. I think it's a very fair way to evaluate students, especially in subjects with dogmatic content. On this journey, I realized that the stage of organizing the questions was a critical phase for my planning.

I also discovered that there are a number of tools (for example, the note editors in the style Zettelkasten ) that help solve this problem. The one that most adapted to my way of working was the organization around tags, which is precisely the vocation of the Bear app. By the way, all the features I use are covered by the app's free plan.

Finally, even if you don't have the same demand as mine, I think it's worth trying, because creating the habit of taking notes in an organized way helps solve a series of other typical problems of those who work with the organization of information and the writing of texts.

PS1: Bear is a note-taking app for Mac, designed around an advanced nested tagging tool ( nested tags ). Although it seems simple, it is a very complex and unique solution, which allows you to create a hierarchical navigation on the subjects of your interest.

Unfortunately, because this is a Bear-only approach, the Windows user will need to find their own way of organizing it within the other available options: OneNote , Evernote , Boostnote , and so on . None of them have nested labeling.

PS2: New post on how to correct objective tests by cell phone.