ChatGPT for students: keep a semester-long study chat fast

Two things make student use different. The first is time: a study chat is not a session, it is a term. By week ten it holds hundreds of exchanges, and the explanation you need for an exam is somewhere in the middle. The second is hardware — a lot of student laptops are several years old, and a very long conversation is precisely the workload that makes an older machine struggle.

Those two pull in opposite directions, which is why a single behaviour cannot serve both. "Only load latest X messages" keeps the page small by default, so a term-long chat opens quickly and stays responsive. When you actually need the history, you press for it — a batch at a time, or the whole conversation at once.

For revision, the useful move is getting the chat out of the browser. A PDF export turns a term of questions and answers into something you can read offline, print, annotate, or put in a folder with the rest of your notes. It covers the entire conversation, not just what happens to be on screen.

All of it is free to use, and the parts you are most likely to want day to day — choosing how chats load, search, and the navigator — have no daily limit at all.