Schooltraq Reflex is a natural language engine that lets you rapidly add new assignments in plain English. Instead of opening the “Add assignment” window, you can simply hit the R key while on your Dashboard or click “Reflex” in the top-right corner and then type “Shakespeare essay in English tomorrow”. Schooltraq will recognize what you mean to say and then add the assignment for you.

Reflex has often been compared to the Quick Add feature in Google Calendar. Just like Google Calendar tries to guess the location and time of your event by what you enter, Reflex also attempts to figure out what you mean as quickly and accurately as possible.

Reflex, however, also updates in real-time. As you type, you can see what Reflex thinks you mean. If Reflex is confused, don’t worry – keep on going! When you’re ready and everything looks good, simply hit Enter to add the assignment.

Quick tips for success with Reflex

These are the four most helpful tips for using Reflex quickly and effectively:

The general order must be followed. You must enter your statements in the following order:assignment name, then the course name, then its due date. You can be a bit creative with each field but you must spell the course name exactly as its course alias or course name. This means that “Journal entry in english Thursday” is okay, but “English journal entry Thursday” is not (the order was not followed in the latter example).

To save time, skip helper words. You can include words like “due” or “in”, but Reflex will remove them anyway. To Reflex, “Problems in math class due in 2 days” means the same thing as if you entered “Problems math 2”. It’s your choice, though, which form you decide to use.

Literal dates must be preceded with “on”. If you want an assignment to be due on February 2, for example, you cannot enter “Call partner in debate 2/2”. Instead, you must use “on 2/2” instead of just “2/2”. In a similar vein, you should avoid ambiguous due dates: “in a few days” is too broad.

Simply add an exclamation mark at the end to mark as important. To save some time, you can mark assignments as important from Reflex directly by making sure the last character is an exclamation mark.

Using course aliases with Schooltraq Reflex

If you set a course alias for your courses, Reflex will use that alias instead of the course name. If your course name was “PHY201 Intro Physics”, for example, you could make your course alias “Physics”. We recommend course aliases that are English, one word, and simple to remember.

To add or edit a course alias, visit the Options page and edit any course.

Some more examples of statements Reflex can understand

• Civil War test in History in two days
• German essay in German due yesterday
  (Schooltraq will mark the first word “German” as the class at first, but as you continue typing, it will fix itself.)
• Orchestra concert materials in Music next Tuesday
• Game coding project in Computer Science on 5/24