About Greenlight
Greenlight is a study tracker for the NSW HSC. It starts from one claim, which is either true or the whole thing is pointless: the syllabus is finite, so it can be finished.
Why it exists
"Study more" is useless advice because it has no finish line. You can spend three hours rereading a topic and come away with no idea whether you are closer to ready or just closer to tired. That is not a discipline problem. It is a visibility problem: nobody hands a seventeen year old a list of exactly what ready looks like, and without one, revise everything feels like the only safe plan.
It is also wrong. Every course is a known, countable list of things you have to be able to do. Greenlight is that list, 1,595 of them across 16 subjects, with a way to say where you stand on each one and a picture of what is left.
Where the traffic light came from
It is not a new idea and it is not ours. Students have been printing the syllabus and going down it with three highlighters for as long as there have been syllabuses. Teachers call it RAG rating. It works because it is fast, because three options is few enough to answer honestly, and because the middle one gives you somewhere to put "I sort of can" instead of forcing a lie in one direction.
What the highlighter version cannot do is anything afterwards. The sheet goes in a drawer, it is out of date in a fortnight, and it never tells you what to do on a Tuesday night. Greenlight's only real contribution is to make those three colours the input to everything else: what comes up for revision and when, how ready you are for a specific assessment, which subject is drifting, where your hours actually went against where your gaps actually are.
That is also why red is drawn as information rather than as an alarm. A wall of red on a module you have not studied yet is correct, not a verdict. The app would be worthless if rating honestly felt bad.
Who it is for
Students in Years 11 and 12 in New South Wales, carrying four to seven subjects at once, whose entire post-school outcome is compressed into one number they are reminded of constantly. Nobody assigns this app. It sits on a phone next to everything else on that phone, so if it feels like a chore to open, it does not get opened, which is why how it looks and how fast it starts are treated here as features rather than polish.
Parents and tutors are a second audience, and a deliberately limited one. A student can export a progress report for one subject listing every skill and how they have rated it. Study groups compare aggregate figures, never anybody's individual ratings, and you can be anonymous inside one. Nothing is shared out of your account unless you are the one sharing it.
What it deliberately is not
There is no box to type your study hours into. A timer runs while you work and the session is written from what it recorded, because an app that lets you claim hours you did not do becomes a diary of things that did not happen.
There is no confetti, no mascot, no streak-loss guilt and no celebratory noise. Someone preparing for the most consequential exams of their life so far is not going to trust something that behaves like a mobile game, and the trust matters more than the dopamine.
It does not tell you that you are doing great. It tells you what is green, what is not, and what is closest to moving.
About the content
Every skill in Greenlight is written independently, from scratch, to cover the full scope of each course. Nothing is copied or paraphrased from the official syllabus documents. Each skill is phrased as a question you ask yourself, carries a plain-language breakdown of what performing it involves, and comes with worked examples: 4,758 of them at the last count.
Greenlight is not affiliated with, endorsed by or approved by the NSW Education Standards Authority, and its content is not the official syllabus. See the terms for the full statement.