You know the syllabus. Fourteen pages, a grading breakdown on page 3, a schedule grid buried on page 9, and somewhere in the footer, a line that says "subject to change." It's a real document. It is not, on its own, a plan.
Here's what actually happens when you upload one: not the marketing version, the actual steps.
Step 1: Drop it in
Go to Add a syllabus. You can drop a PDF, a photo of a printed one, or just paste the text straight in if that's faster. Anything up to 20 MB works, and if you've got a scanned or photographed copy instead of a clean PDF, that's fine too. It goes through the same process.
While you're there, it's worth filling in your term's first and last day if you have them handy. You don't have to. But a lot of syllabi write deadlines as "Week 6" instead of an actual date, and without a term start date, there's no way to know when Week 6 is.
Step 2: It reads the whole thing
Once you hit "Read my syllabus," it takes about two minutes. You can leave the tab open or close it (it keeps going either way), but if you stick around, you'll see what it's actually doing:
- Reading the whole document. Tables, schedule grids, and all: it's looking at the layout, not just a flattened wall of text.
- Working out real dates. Anything written as "Week 6" gets counted from your term start. Anything genuinely vague gets flagged instead of guessed at.
- Expanding repeating work. A weekly quiz becomes every date it actually falls on, skipping holidays.
Step 3: Check what it flagged
When it's done, you'll see a count, something like "Found 14 things to do." If everything had a clear date, you're done, straight to your plan. If a few items came from something ambiguous (a "TBD" final, a vague reading assignment), those get called out specifically so you can check them before they land on your calendar. Usually it's a handful of items, not the whole list.
Step 4: See what's actually next
From there you land on Today: not a wall of every assignment you now have, but one thing to start, how long it should take, and why that one specifically got picked over everything else due later. That's the part a syllabus, by itself, was never going to give you.
If you've got more than one class, you can add each syllabus the same way. Every one adds its assignments, exams, and quizzes to the same plan, so you're not juggling five separate PDFs to figure out what's actually due this week.
Curious where your semester actually stands before you upload anything? The two-minute Semester Load Score quiz gives you a read on how tight your week looks, then walks you straight into building the real thing from your own syllabus.