There is a belief among students in Nepal that good study material costs money - that the students who do well have access to expensive tuition, imported books and paid courses.
Some of that is true. Most of it is not, and the gap between what is freely available and what students actually use is enormous.
This is a guide to what is genuinely free, genuinely good, and worth your limited data. It also says where free resources fall short, because a list that pretends otherwise is not useful.
Start With What You Already Have
Before any website: three resources most students under-use because they are unglamorous.
Your textbook. It is written to the curriculum you are examined on, which is more than can be said for almost anything on the internet. Most students read it once and revise from notes copied out of it - which is strictly worse than revising from the book itself. The end-of-chapter questions in particular are the closest free thing to exam practice you own, and they are routinely skipped.
Your school's past paper collection. Nearly every school keeps one, and many keep the marking schemes too. Asking your subject teacher takes thirty seconds and beats any search. Marking schemes are worth more than the papers, because they show what the marker is actually ticking.
Your teachers. Two minutes at the desk after class, with a specific written question, is the highest-quality help available to you and it costs nothing. Teachers respond very differently to "I got lost at step three of the refraction example" than to "I don't understand this chapter".
Before downloading anything, do the end-of-chapter questions in your own textbook, closed-book, and mark them strictly. Most students discover they cannot do half of them, which is more useful information than any new resource.
Official Nepali Sources
These are the authorities. Anything that contradicts them is wrong.
Curriculum Development Centre publishes the curriculum and the specification grids - the documents that say how many marks come from which unit and at what level. Reading the grid for your subject takes twenty minutes and reshapes revision more than any study technique, because it tells you where the marks actually are rather than where the chapters are.
National Examinations Board is the authority for the examination itself - schedules, notices, and the rules on things like grade increment examinations. Note the apex domain rather than the www form, which does not serve reliably.
Ministry of Education, Science and Technology carries policy, notices and scholarship announcements.
University Grants Commission matters once you are looking past Grade 12 - it lists recognised institutions and publishes scholarship information.
Two habits worth forming with these: check the year on anything you download, and prefer the official statement over a summary of it circulating on a messaging app. Curricula change, and a "SEE guide" from six years ago may describe an exam that no longer exists.
Free Material for the Concepts
The category where the internet genuinely outperforms what most schools can provide.
Khan Academy is the strongest free resource for Maths and Science concepts, full stop. Video explanations plus practice questions, and the practice is the part students skip. Not aligned to the Nepali curriculum - notation and method sometimes differ from what your marker expects - so use it to understand a concept and your textbook to learn how to present it.
PhET simulations are interactive physics and chemistry simulations from the University of Colorado. Genuinely excellent for the topics that are hard to picture: circuits, waves, gas behaviour, chemical reactions. If your school's lab is under-equipped - and many are - this is the closest free substitute for having seen the thing happen.
GeoGebra and Desmos plot functions and construct geometry interactively. For Optional Maths especially, seeing what changing a coefficient does to a curve builds intuition that no amount of algebra practice produces.
OpenStax publishes free, properly peer-reviewed textbooks. University-level in places, which makes them useful for Grade 11-12 Physics, Chemistry and Biology when your textbook's explanation is too compressed.
MIT OpenCourseWare is far beyond school level for most subjects. Worth knowing about anyway: if you are a Grade 12 student who genuinely loves a subject, seeing what it looks like at university is motivating in a way nothing else is.
Free Reading and Reference
Wikipedia is a legitimate starting point for background understanding and a poor one for exam answers. Use it to grasp what something is before reading your textbook's version, and never cite it as your source in an answer.
Project Gutenberg holds tens of thousands of out-of-copyright books, free, including a great deal of the English literature that turns up in curricula. If your English course expects you to have read something, it may well be here.
Open Library is a catalogue with borrowing for many titles, and it is useful for finding out whether a book exists and what is in it before you spend money on it.
Wikibooks and Wikiversity are uneven in quality - some excellent material, some abandoned stubs. Worth a look for a specific topic, not worth browsing.
All four of these are open educational resources, which means the licensing genuinely permits free use rather than merely tolerating it.
YouTube, Used Deliberately
YouTube is the most-used and worst-used free resource available to Nepali students.
What it is good for: a curriculum-specific explanation from a Nepali teacher, in Nepali, of the exact topic you are stuck on. That material exists in quantity now and it did not five years ago. Searching your topic plus "SEE" or "NEB" will usually find someone teaching it to your syllabus.
What it is bad for: everything else. Watching is passive, it feels productive, and it is the most data-expensive study you can do. An hour of streamed video can cost more data than a week of reading PDFs.
Three rules turn it from a time sink into a tool:
Watch with a pen and stop the video. Pause after each step and attempt it yourself before continuing. A video watched straight through has taught you almost nothing, because you followed someone else's reasoning rather than producing your own.
Watch one video, then do questions. Not three videos. The second and third feel like progress and are avoidance of the harder work.
Drop the quality. A maths explanation at 360p is exactly as useful as one at 1080p and costs a fraction of the data.
Judging Whether a Free Resource Is Any Good
There is more free material aimed at Nepali students than anyone can use, and a meaningful share of it is wrong, out of date or aimed at a different syllabus. Four questions sort most of it.
Does it match your board and your year? A brilliant explanation of a topic no longer in the curriculum is worth nothing. Notation matters too: a method taught in an Indian or international video may be correct and still not be what your marker expects.
Can you tell who made it? Anonymous PDFs circulating on messaging apps are the least reliable material in wide circulation, and they are the most shared. A named teacher, a school, a government body or an established open-resource project is a different proposition entirely.
When was it made? Check the date on anything describing exam structure, mark distribution or eligibility rules.
Does it ask anything of you? A resource that only explains is one you consume. A resource that sets questions is one you practise with. Prefer the second, always. Where you cannot find questions, generate them yourself - or ask an AI tutor to.
Where Free Resources Fall Short
Being straight about this, because a list that oversells is not useful.
They do not know your syllabus. Almost every high-quality free resource is built for an international audience. It will teach you the physics and not the paper.
They do not mark your work. This is the largest gap by far. You can learn a concept from a video and have no way of knowing whether your written answer would earn the marks - and in the SEE and NEB papers, how you present an answer is a substantial part of the grade. Marking is what teachers, marking schemes and to a lesser degree AI tutors provide, and no amount of free video substitutes.
They do not sequence anything. A free resource answers the question you asked. Deciding what to study, in what order, and continuing when nobody is checking is self-directed learning, and it is the actual skill the internet demands of you. Most saved material is never opened again for exactly this reason.
They assume connectivity. Which brings us to the constraint that shapes everything.
Working With Limited Data and Power
Most guides to online learning assume constant electricity and a stable connection. A large number of students in Nepal have neither, and that is one face of the digital divide.
Split your work into connected and offline queues. Downloading, video, AI tutoring and searching are connected. Working problems, writing answers, self-testing from question sheets and reading a downloaded PDF are not. Do each in its window rather than discovering at 8pm that everything you planned needs data you do not have.
Download in the good window. Pull down the PDF, the past paper, the video while you have power and signal. Treat it like fetching water before the tap goes off.
Have an offline default ready. The moment the power cuts should trigger a known alternative - papers on paper, question cards, maths problems. Students who have not decided this in advance simply stop.
Text costs almost nothing; video costs a lot. A past paper is a few hundred kilobytes. If data is tight, weight your study towards reading and problem-working, which is the more effective activity anyway.
There is a real advantage hidden in this constraint. Offline work is inherently active - you are producing answers - while most online study is inherently passive. Students who build an offline routine often end up doing more retrieval practice than students with perfect connections.
A Free Study Stack That Actually Works
If you want a concrete setup rather than a list:
- Your textbook for the syllabus and the end-of-chapter questions.
- Past papers from your school, sat timed and marked strictly. This is the highest-value item and it is free.
- The specification grid from the CDC, read once per subject, to decide where your hours go.
- Khan Academy or a Nepali YouTube teacher for the two or three concepts you genuinely cannot get from the book.
- PhET or GeoGebra for the topics you cannot picture.
- Your own question sheets, one per topic, reviewed oldest-first.
- A teacher, for marking. The one thing on this list that cannot be replaced by anything free online.
That is a complete preparation. Nothing in it costs money, and the two most valuable items - past papers and a teacher's marking - are the two most likely to already be within walking distance.
The Short Version
The material is not the constraint. Almost everything a student in Nepal needs to prepare well is free, and the two best items are your own textbook's questions and your school's past papers.
Use official Nepali sources for anything about the exam, international free resources for understanding concepts, and YouTube deliberately rather than passively. Judge everything by whether it matches your board, who made it, when, and whether it asks anything of you.
And accept the one real gap honestly: free resources explain, but they do not mark. For that, go and find a person.