Polya lets you choose how much help you want in each course: Open for full worked answers, Guided for hints first, Practice for quiz-style questions, and Review. Until this week those choices only applied inside askpolya.com. Plenty of students already have Claude or ChatGPT open, and that is where the questions go.
Polya now connects to both. In Claude, add it under Customize, then Connectors, as a custom connector, and sign in to Polya. Once connected, the assistant can do three things, all read-only:
- List the courses you have added to Polya.
- Read the study mode you chose for a course, with what it allows and what it does not.
- Search that course's readings, slides, pages, and lecture transcripts, and cite the passages it used.
Nothing in Polya or in your school's systems is changed by the connection. In Practice mode the search never returns answer keys.
Most of the work went into making the outside assistant follow your choice the way Polya does. Two things came out of testing it ourselves. First, after we switched a course from Practice to Open mid-conversation, the assistant kept using the old mode until we told it to check again. The connector now tells it to re-read the mode before every new coursework question. Second, the assistant would refuse to give away part (a) of a problem, then answer the rest when asked "what about the rest." Each part of a problem is now its own question under the same rules.
In every mode, the assistant is told to teach: name the course concept, show how it applies step by step, cite the passages it used, and end with a quick check you can reuse. A bare answer is not the help Polya is for, even in Open.
One honest limit: Polya can tell the assistant what you chose, but it cannot force another company's model to obey. We tightened the instructions each time our own testing found a gap. If you see it slip, tell us.