Med school anki
If you nailed it you’d click “Easy” and you wouldn’t have to worry about it for 4 days. If you knew it you’d click “Good” and see it in 10 minutes. If you forgot how ACE inhibitors affect RPF - you’d click “Again” and see the card again in a minute. Every time you answer a card, you rank it “Again,” “Good,” or “Easy,” and Anki will go through an algorithm to estimate the next time you need a reminder for that card. You make a bunch of flashcards that you think are important, then everyday you review a certain number of them. It looks intimidating at first, but it’s reallyreallyreally great. And so on.Īnki is an flashcard system that uses spaced repetition. If you get it wrong, it’ll come back tomorrow. Then, on the second day Anki will refeed you that question, and if you can answer it, you won’t see the question again for a few days. On the first day Anki will feed you a flash card question until you can answer it. Spaced repetition is the concept underlying qstream. That’s where Anki/spaced repetition comes in. You aren’t learning anything new.ģ- If you wait too long, you’ll have forgotten too much and you’ll need to relearn it entirely, which takes a lot of time and mental energy. Think about the end of study week when you’re seeing the same material for the fifth time. So hypothetically, study week is a waste of your time. We might remember it well on the day of the exam, but after that we’re quickly sliding down the exponential forgetting curve.ġ- We can strengthen those memory synapses if we get a reminder at the right times.Ģ- It’s pointless to review facts too early in the exponential decline curve because you remember them too well.
We cram an absurd amount of facts during study week and don’t touch them for months. It highlights the problem with the block exam system. Let me take a step back and explain memory. Not only does that sound incredibly stressful, I just don’t trust my short-term memory enough to trust that method. After spending block after block cramming, forgetting, and repeating, we reach those dreaded 6-8 weeks before Step 1 (shout out to M2’s, God speed) when students spend 12+ hours a day with their heads stuck in board review books trying to recapture all that long gone knowledge. But is all that knowledge just sitting in our short-term memories?
The assumption is that if you can remember the material from the block on that one exam day, you’ve learned it, and will retain it. (roughly 800 pgs of notes) Then after the exam, we purge all that knowledge and start over. Think about how the majority of med students learn. We glance over material throughout the week, attend lecture, then we might re-read it once over the weekend, but then we forget about it until test week when we massively cram in four to six weeks worth of lectures.