A weekly test schedule for a coaching batch is three templates, not one: a steady seven-day cycle for the long middle months, a compressed cycle for the eight weeks after the syllabus closes, and a taper for the final fortnight that deliberately does less. All three are below, with the reasoning behind each placement, so you can copy whichever fits your batch today.
These assume limited staff - one or two people writing papers alongside a full teaching load. One rule outranks the rest: a paper that arrives late has already failed, because the slot it was built for has gone. For how many papers a series needs overall, read how to create an online test series; this piece is the calendar.
The Weekly Cycle: Six Beats, Monday to Monday
The steady state for the long middle of a course, while the syllabus is still being taught. Six beats, one paper, nothing due on Friday. Shift the day names to your own timetable; the spacing is what matters.
- Monday to Thursday - teach. No paper is due and no paper is discussed. Protect these four days or the test starts eating the course it was meant to measure.
- Thursday evening - publish the paper and send the link, with the day, the hour and the duration written out in words. Nothing on the platform notifies a student about a test, so this message is the entire announcement.
- Saturday, one fixed hour - the batch sits it together. The fixed hour is not about control; it is what makes the discussion class possible, by putting the same paper in every head at once.
- Saturday night - open the analytics once, and only to build Monday's agenda. Not to rank the batch.
- Sunday or Monday - the discussion class, forty-five minutes, agenda already written on Saturday night.
- Monday - duplicate this week's paper into next week's shell before you teach anything else. Doing it while the structure is fresh is the cheapest insurance against a Thursday with no paper.
Why the Test Sits a Week Behind the Teaching
Saturday's paper covers the chapters taught the week before, not the week just finished. A test on material taught the same week measures whether a student can hold a method for a few days, which is not what the real exam asks. A week's gap is long enough that easy recall has faded and the method has to be rebuilt, short enough that the chapter is still in reach.
The second reason saves the schedule. A paper on last week's chapters can be written while this week's are being taught, so the writer never races the teacher. A paper on this week's chapters has to be finished on Thursday for material taught on Thursday, and that is the version that collapses first.
Why the Discussion Class Must Land Inside Two Days
A student who sits a paper on Saturday can still tell you, on Monday, what they were thinking when they chose option C. By the following Saturday, little is left but the score. The discussion class is the one place where a paper turns into teaching, and its raw material has a short life. Every other placement here protects that slot.
Build the agenda from the paper, not from the batch. The creator analytics page hands you most of it: a Common Misconceptions card ranking questions by how many students got them wrong and naming the wrong option most of them picked, plus a most-skipped list. Both show the top five. Take the misconceptions first - a wrong answer the whole batch shares is one teaching error, not a roomful of separate mistakes. The per-question figures average over everyone who attempted that question, so a question half the batch skipped reads better than it deserves.
The Compressed Cycle: The Eight Weeks Before the Taper
Once the syllabus is finished or nearly so, the paper changes job - from checking a chapter to rehearsing an exam. Volume rises across these eight weeks, but not by doubling the full-lengths: volume a tired batch stops turning up for is not volume at all.
- One full-length every week, at the real exam's length. A batch preparing for SSC MTS sits all 90 questions for 270 marks across two sessions of 45 minutes, Session I qualifying with no penalty and Session II deducting one mark - not a shortened stand-in.
- One sectional in alternate weeks only, so four across the eight. Sectionals exist for the single area the full-lengths keep exposing - write each after the discussion class that revealed the need.
- Put the full-length on the weekday and hour the real paper runs. Sitting a morning exam at night for eight weeks rehearses the wrong conditions.
- Keep the discussion class the same length, not longer. A full-length throws up more to discuss, which is the argument for discussing less of it: a handful of questions taught properly beats a key read aloud.
- Stop writing new chapter tests. Anything a student still needs at this range is revision of papers they have already sat.
The Taper: The Final Fortnight
The taper reduces volume. Institutes get this wrong because the fortnight before an exam feels like the moment to push hardest, and the student's own anxiety agrees. A new full-length three days out leaves no time to act on anything it finds, and risks a bad score at the worst possible moment - a trade nobody would accept if it were said out loud.
- First week of the fortnight - one full-length, at the real time, treated openly as the last rehearsal. Discuss it inside two days, as always.
- Second week - one short paper early on, built from questions the batch has already seen. It exists to end the series on a score the student likes, which is a legitimate reason to set a paper.
- The last three or four days - nothing new. A student who wants a clock running can reopen any paper you have published, because a published paper stays open.
- Keep the discussion slot even with no new paper to discuss. It becomes the doubt session, and if nobody turns up, that is information too.
A test series is not a quantity of papers. It is a promise that the next one lands on the day you said it would.
What Twenty-Six Weeks Add Up To
Six months is about 26 weeks, and the three templates divide it without a remainder. Week 1 is a diagnostic, sat before the cycle starts: one paper. Weeks 2 to 16 are fifteen weeks of the steady cycle at one paper each: fifteen papers. Weeks 17 to 24 are the eight compressed weeks - eight full-lengths plus four alternate-week sectionals: twelve papers. Weeks 25 and 26 are the taper: two papers. One plus fifteen plus twelve plus two is thirty papers across twenty-six weeks.
Thirty is the ceiling for one person writing alongside a teaching load, and a single-handed institute should plan below it. Drop the alternate-week sectionals and the count falls to twenty-six: one paper a week, no week off. Cut the number before you cut the deadline. A batch forgives a shorter series; it does not forgive a Saturday with nothing to sit.
The Platform Has No Calendar, Which Changes the Template
Worth saying plainly: the schedule above is a document you keep, not a setting you enter. A mock paper is either published or it is not. The exam card carries a publish toggle, and the card's Share action refuses to copy a link until the paper is published. There is no start date, no closing date and no availability window on a mock.
Three consequences. A published paper is public - anyone with the link can attempt it, and it is listed in the public library, so a Saturday paper cannot be held to your batch alone. Nobody is notified: the product sends transactional account email for signup and password reset, and nothing at all about a test - your own message is the schedule. And the only way to close a paper is to unpublish it by hand - also the step before you can delete one.
A scheduled start with a countdown does exist, but only for live sessions, where the room moves through questions together on your screen. Even there, auto-start fires on the creator's own control room at the first sync past the scheduled time, so nothing begins unattended - and a very large sitting is better run as an ordinary mock at an hour you announce than as one live room. There is no proctoring either - no webcam, no lockdown browser, no tab-switch detection - so a fixed sitting hour is an agreement with your batch, not an enforcement on it.
Build Next Week's Paper From Last Week's
The Monday beat is what makes the cycle repeatable. Duplicate from the exam card's menu and the copy arrives with a (Copy) suffix and unpublished - the shell is safe to work in while you swap the questions. The copy carries the marking scheme at every level, the timing groups and the language links, so a bilingual paper stays bilingual and a two-session paper keeps both clocks. That copying is fail-soft by design, so open the copy and read the marks panel before you publish.
Then replace the questions. When the source is a PDF you already hold, the route open to every creator is the extraction prompt in the JSON upload guide, run through whatever AI you already use, with the output uploaded as JSON. Figures survive that trip, because the upload crops them out of your own PDF for approval. Server-side PDF import exists but is off by default and switched on per creator on request, so do not build a weekly deadline around it. The importer leaves numeric, TITA and match-the-column questions for you to type in.
The Weekly Checklist for a Small Office
- Thursday: paper published, link copied, message sent with the day, the hour and the duration spelled out.
- Thursday: preview the paper yourself and sit a few questions. A creator preview records nothing, so it costs only the minutes.
- Saturday: tell students to sit on one device and not close the tab. A sitting resumes if they return inside five minutes on the same device; past that the old one is sealed and filed as a ranked attempt - and the clock ran either way.
- Saturday night: agenda written from the Common Misconceptions and most-skipped lists. One line per question.
- Monday: discussion class held, then next week's duplicate made before anything else.
- Monthly: compare the plan against what shipped. The analytics page shows total attempts, unique students and a daily attempts chart, which tells you when your batch actually sits papers, as against the hour you announced.
The rest of what a creator can build - sections with their own clocks, pooled timing groups, bilingual papers - is set out on the creator overview, and none of it costs anything. For the retention argument underneath weekly testing, read how to retain students with weekly tests; for standing a series up from nothing, how to start an online test series.