I initially wanted to name this article ‘6 Rules’ but some would say rules are only idealistic and not meant to be followed. Therefore I call these ‘Steps’ because steps are essential, taking steps elevate you, they will get you somewhere, perhaps a remarkable Step score. Studying premade cards may be ideal for board exams but you will need to create your own cards from lecture material or other resources in order to do well on your school exams.

Anki is a powerful tool for memorizing anything, especially the truck-load of information that is medical school. It’s not enough to have a shallow understanding of the material, we’re expected to know information in great detail. The first step in learning anything is understanding, and once that process is over, one must memorize all the details so as to be able to teach others without referring to notes. This is true mastery. The steps I lay out in this article are universal to making flash cards from any material whether you’re studying for an exam or learning a language. I use examples in medicine since most of my readers are medical students. You can use these tips to create high yield Anki cards from text-books, lecture slides, YouTube videos, or any other resources you use to study.



Step #1: Do Not Make Cards for Every Detail

One pitfall most new Anki users fall into is making too many cards at the beginning soon to only realize that the burden of reviewing becomes overwhelming. Anki’s spaced-repetition algorithm works best only if you complete all of your scheduled reviews daily. This is why you should only make cards on facts that are high-yield and details that are easy to forget. Now you may be asking, ‘How do I know what’s high yield?” Here’s the mystery and art of figuring that out. This power will come to you naturally day by day as you write cards, but for now you must think like an exam maker. This means doing practice questions relevant to your study material daily. This gives you a good guage on knowing what’s most likely to be tested. At the beginning, only create high-yield cards and later add more cards to fill in the holes in your knowledge by referring back to the source. This ensures that your card numbers stay managable and you’re using the spaced-repetition system to its fullest potential. Always check to see if there are cards already made for a topic in a pre-made deck so search and unsuspend those cards to avoid redundancy.



Step #2 Use Cloze-Deletion Cards

Cloze Deletion is a fancy term for ‘fill in the blank’. Some of you might be questioning why I only use this type of note when creating text based cards instead of basic (traditional) cards where there’s a front and a back. The reason is because it’s been shown to be more effective and saves you time in the long run. The cards you make are special, meaning you should almost never delete them since you’re going to spend so much time making them. Cloze cards allow you to blank out multiple key terms from a sentence.

Let’s run through an example to see why Cloze cards are superior to Basic cards. Let’s say you want to memorize this fact: ‘A leads to B because of C’. With Cloze cards, you can just blank out terms by highlighting A, B, and/or C and pressing […] or Command+Shift+C so the sentence looks like ‘{{c1::A}} leads to {{c2::B}} because of {{c3::C}}’. Once you do that and click ‘Add’ or Command+Enter, Anki will create three cards which will promt you to recall A, B, and/or C separately. The deletions are indicated by {{c#::}} where # indicates which terms should have their own card. If you were to do this with a traditional card, you would have to create three different cards to test each fact one at a time plus the ambiguity of not knowing what’s actually being asked. One important thing to keep in mind is to create cards that ask you to recall facts forward and backward. You will elevate your memory by adding this simple extra step.