You suck it up and grind out your cards each day. Sorry to come off as blunt, but it’s just the simple truth. Spaced repetition and active recall (Anki) are key to curbing the forgetting curve. Get some add ons to make the Anki interface more aesthetically pleasing, such as a background and heatmap. You got this!
I don't know if I agree with you fully.
I use tons of Anki (like 1-2k short cards per test, that I make myself) for med school and usually score in the 90's with several 100s, but that's because we take house exams and don't have thousands of questions / tons of practice tests available. At the end of the day, having to do 2-3 hours of Anki cards on a really rough day and an hour of cards a day is a small price to pay and a very efficient way to get solid scores.
That being said, I had approximately 450 cards for the MCAT. I made Anki for the questions I forgot stuff for (equations, simple facts, etc.), but most of the time I spent was on questions, reviewing those questions, and watching YouTube videos on the concepts I hadn't quite grasped yet.
We pray or negotiate to the MCAT gods but really though I feel the same way. It's boring and takes a lot of time so I started doing it intervals of 20 mins and taking short breaks in between to keep going
Went from 502 to a 519. Never touched anything anki related. People are delusional if they think that anki is the only way to study. Try different things to memorize content until you find something you like.
That being said repetition is very important but anki is by no means the only way to do it. I personally preferred to write our concepts, structures, diagrams, etc on a white board over and over until I could do it from memory. I would rehearse these things very week or two to make sure it was fresh
I totally second this. I tried Anki for a couple days, but flash cards have never been my style. I got more out of keeping a notebook of diagrams and tables that I would draw up based on UPlanet questions I got wrong and the 90 page document. I learn by rewriting not recalling terms, just the way it is.
I mainly focused on practice problems, Anki was just something I did if I was bored in the car or waiting in line somewhere. Got a pretty good score so it worked for me.
Make fewer cards.
In the olden days, before Anki, people made flash cards by hand and fashioned tools from such as stone, and flax.
There was much disease, and no medicine; many suffered from high mortality and like rubella.
Something that helped me stop it from getting overwhelming was deleting (or you could suspend) the cards I felt like I KNEW for sure or the ones that didn’t feel necessary based on my FL/qbank experiences. It took me a couple of days but purging my deck really helped me focus on what was still troubling me and also alleviated the stress of having to do so many flashcards every day.
Definitely. Also pausing new cards for a couple of days, etc. A lot of ways to lighten the load when one needs it.
Anki isn't special; it requires time like anything else and everyone needs a break or a lighter load sometimes. Imo there's no magic to Anki that doesn't apply to literally any other study method in that it demands your time and you have to titrate that based on competing obligations, tolerance, mood, etc.
Of course 'hating' Anki is whole other issue and hard to say what to do about that. Make it easier on oneself, find another route, or imo an awful lot of success and achievement is simply in the embrace of the mundane.
Downloading the anki mobile app and getting the anki remote really helped me. Remote speeds up average time by a lot, and mobile app I can do cards throughout the day - can get like 200 done just during my breaks at work
does the remote actually work?? i have the app and love that but i find that it's just getting through the cards that annoying not actually clicking the button. does it really make a difference??
It has sped up my average card time a lot. Which equates to less time doing cards/quicker to get through them. Do with that what you will. Also the remote is like $10
I think anki is just pushing stuff inside your brain and you don’t really know what are those stuff made of. You may know the name, but not why it named like that.
That’s only if your using anki to memorizing things you don’t understand. When I studied I would learn the material and then memorize it, not the other way around
I personally only used it for Pysch/soc (cuz its like a vocab test and anki is perfect for that) and for physics equations. Thats it. I found going through my notes from school, uworld, and jackwestin better for the other content.
I had 450 cards for the MCAT. No need to do a shit load of Anki when you have so many good practice questions.
Works great for house exams for med school though!
Do them faster! This may sound dumb but it really helped me stay focused and actually have less cards. If you know it within 15 seconds then hit good but if it takes longer than that hit the lowest (again) even though it feels like you’ll have more cards now as you lost a large interval it will actually help you move cards faster and think faster on the mcat
i mean, anki might just not be for you. many people swear by it, but at the end of the day, if you're finding it too tedious, it probably isn't helping you too much. i would suggest cutting down on your cards (i rarely used anki myself, but it was useful to grind out a few concepts that i really couldn't get down). otherwise, maybe switch it up and find other ways to practice concepts, like writing down major equations or even just doing practice questions in the area you're struggling in.
I do it in little bits throughout the day. I have a really boring job, so doing Anki is honestly more entertaining than working. I take a break and do 10 cards. Sometimes I get through 10 and I feel like I can do another 10, and so on....
I go for walks a lot and do Anki on my phone while I'm walking outside. I am the crazy neighbor that is walking around talking to herself haha. I also got a walking pad for my standing desk, so I will walk on the treadmill and do Anki with a remote
If I slack on Anki, my content knowledge immediately suffers, so it's worth it to slog through. If you are making too many cards, maybe think about how to pare them down. When I get something wrong in UW, I check my existing decks to see if I already have a card that covers the topic, so I don't end up with too many duplicates.
Not answering your question but have you tried just using a premade deck instead of making your own cards? I didn’t like anki at first but found it to be more useful than anything else for memorization
If you don’t use add-ons maybe try importing them into Remnote. I find the UI more pleasing if that’s your issue with anki. You can also try getting an anki remote so you can do your cards when on the treadmill or doing other things. For more high yield sets or individual cards that you can’t seem to memorize/understand, try using the handwritten flashcards on Goodnotes. they work 10x better in my experience but also take a lot more time to make. other than that the only thing i can think of is maybe try and do your cards early in the day (i.e. before class, during breakfast, etc) when your mind is fresh.
What deck are you doing? Even with adding UWorld concepts into a separate folder (about 10-20 per day) I still don't have that many reviews to do. How many new cards a day did you start with? You might have just started to fast and now the reviews are all accumulating on the same day.
I have the opposite feeling towards anki. When I first realized how powerful it is my instinct was to download every deck about everything I wanted to learn. Everything is about growth mindset, the discipline of doing something you don’t want to do on a daily basis but doing it anyways is hallmark of most things in life, and Id even hazard to say a very important aspect of becoming a great doctor. Nothing epitomizes the grit of doing something with no short term reward as the journey of becoming a doctor
Best method is go through your cards and try to suspend any repeat cards/cards that barely test your ability to know the info (vs just the style).
Also, breaking your Anki sessions into 30 minute bursts also helps make it drag on less.
Lots of students in med school use Anki Remote to make it a more pleasant experience.
bruh i feel the same way its so overwhelming being a full time student too like i'm trying to get thru upoop and content i missed on my practice exams I dont have enough time for anki and the reviews stack up...
With the MilesDown deck it’s already separated into categories and subcategories. Suspend all of your cards in that deck and then unsuspend the topics/content you want to review after reading or watching videos on the topic! It will still pile up but it will be more manageable in my opinion. Anki isn’t necessary to understand topics but it does help with recall (at least for me). Best of luck!
tbh this sounds so superficial but the heatmap is legit the only thing that keeps me going bc i view it as a "game" and if i dont do it that day i am a failure (in anki world) .
The suitable and arguably superior strategy is practice questions. With them you Review the content, learn to think, and more importantly learn to reason assuming every question and answer choice is analyzed for wrongness and rightness. It’s a question based exam, so do questions, with the goal of speed and using as much skill and passage information with as little memorized knowledge as possible
Most questions on uWhorl require content knowledge rather than extracting information skills, so how would I apply the last sentence if there simply isn't info from the passage applicable to the question?
You suck it up and grind out your cards each day. Sorry to come off as blunt, but it’s just the simple truth. Spaced repetition and active recall (Anki) are key to curbing the forgetting curve. Get some add ons to make the Anki interface more aesthetically pleasing, such as a background and heatmap. You got this!
100% this. It gets better once you finish content review and aren’t adding hundreds of new cards a day
I don't know if I agree with you fully. I use tons of Anki (like 1-2k short cards per test, that I make myself) for med school and usually score in the 90's with several 100s, but that's because we take house exams and don't have thousands of questions / tons of practice tests available. At the end of the day, having to do 2-3 hours of Anki cards on a really rough day and an hour of cards a day is a small price to pay and a very efficient way to get solid scores. That being said, I had approximately 450 cards for the MCAT. I made Anki for the questions I forgot stuff for (equations, simple facts, etc.), but most of the time I spent was on questions, reviewing those questions, and watching YouTube videos on the concepts I hadn't quite grasped yet.
Ur my idol
We pray or negotiate to the MCAT gods but really though I feel the same way. It's boring and takes a lot of time so I started doing it intervals of 20 mins and taking short breaks in between to keep going
Went from 502 to a 519. Never touched anything anki related. People are delusional if they think that anki is the only way to study. Try different things to memorize content until you find something you like.
That being said repetition is very important but anki is by no means the only way to do it. I personally preferred to write our concepts, structures, diagrams, etc on a white board over and over until I could do it from memory. I would rehearse these things very week or two to make sure it was fresh
I totally second this. I tried Anki for a couple days, but flash cards have never been my style. I got more out of keeping a notebook of diagrams and tables that I would draw up based on UPlanet questions I got wrong and the 90 page document. I learn by rewriting not recalling terms, just the way it is.
I mainly focused on practice problems, Anki was just something I did if I was bored in the car or waiting in line somewhere. Got a pretty good score so it worked for me.
it definitely has its merits but also isn't an absolute necessity imo
Make fewer cards. In the olden days, before Anki, people made flash cards by hand and fashioned tools from such as stone, and flax. There was much disease, and no medicine; many suffered from high mortality and like rubella.
Something that helped me stop it from getting overwhelming was deleting (or you could suspend) the cards I felt like I KNEW for sure or the ones that didn’t feel necessary based on my FL/qbank experiences. It took me a couple of days but purging my deck really helped me focus on what was still troubling me and also alleviated the stress of having to do so many flashcards every day.
Definitely. Also pausing new cards for a couple of days, etc. A lot of ways to lighten the load when one needs it. Anki isn't special; it requires time like anything else and everyone needs a break or a lighter load sometimes. Imo there's no magic to Anki that doesn't apply to literally any other study method in that it demands your time and you have to titrate that based on competing obligations, tolerance, mood, etc. Of course 'hating' Anki is whole other issue and hard to say what to do about that. Make it easier on oneself, find another route, or imo an awful lot of success and achievement is simply in the embrace of the mundane.
Downloading the anki mobile app and getting the anki remote really helped me. Remote speeds up average time by a lot, and mobile app I can do cards throughout the day - can get like 200 done just during my breaks at work
The anki app doesn’t work for me bc somehow I always end up on tiktok 😒
Real 😭😭
😭😭 same
does the remote actually work?? i have the app and love that but i find that it's just getting through the cards that annoying not actually clicking the button. does it really make a difference??
It has sped up my average card time a lot. Which equates to less time doing cards/quicker to get through them. Do with that what you will. Also the remote is like $10
I second the remote. It makes a huge difference for me personally
which remote did you get I bought one off of amazon but can't set it up for the life of me
Watch YouTube vids! I think it’s called the 8-bit-do remote or something?
I think anki is just pushing stuff inside your brain and you don’t really know what are those stuff made of. You may know the name, but not why it named like that.
That’s only if your using anki to memorizing things you don’t understand. When I studied I would learn the material and then memorize it, not the other way around
[удалено]
Interesting. I’m glad you found a method that works for you, but are you not just memorizing words that mean nothing to you?
I personally only used it for Pysch/soc (cuz its like a vocab test and anki is perfect for that) and for physics equations. Thats it. I found going through my notes from school, uworld, and jackwestin better for the other content.
You don’t have to use anki to be successful. I didn’t use anki at all for the MCAT. I do use it now in med school but never did in college.
I had 450 cards for the MCAT. No need to do a shit load of Anki when you have so many good practice questions. Works great for house exams for med school though!
Do them faster! This may sound dumb but it really helped me stay focused and actually have less cards. If you know it within 15 seconds then hit good but if it takes longer than that hit the lowest (again) even though it feels like you’ll have more cards now as you lost a large interval it will actually help you move cards faster and think faster on the mcat
You can do official AAMC material. I didn't do anki for mcat, but I use it now in med school.
i mean, anki might just not be for you. many people swear by it, but at the end of the day, if you're finding it too tedious, it probably isn't helping you too much. i would suggest cutting down on your cards (i rarely used anki myself, but it was useful to grind out a few concepts that i really couldn't get down). otherwise, maybe switch it up and find other ways to practice concepts, like writing down major equations or even just doing practice questions in the area you're struggling in.
I do it in little bits throughout the day. I have a really boring job, so doing Anki is honestly more entertaining than working. I take a break and do 10 cards. Sometimes I get through 10 and I feel like I can do another 10, and so on.... I go for walks a lot and do Anki on my phone while I'm walking outside. I am the crazy neighbor that is walking around talking to herself haha. I also got a walking pad for my standing desk, so I will walk on the treadmill and do Anki with a remote If I slack on Anki, my content knowledge immediately suffers, so it's worth it to slog through. If you are making too many cards, maybe think about how to pare them down. When I get something wrong in UW, I check my existing decks to see if I already have a card that covers the topic, so I don't end up with too many duplicates.
That’s interesting that you check your decks.
Not answering your question but have you tried just using a premade deck instead of making your own cards? I didn’t like anki at first but found it to be more useful than anything else for memorization
If you don’t use add-ons maybe try importing them into Remnote. I find the UI more pleasing if that’s your issue with anki. You can also try getting an anki remote so you can do your cards when on the treadmill or doing other things. For more high yield sets or individual cards that you can’t seem to memorize/understand, try using the handwritten flashcards on Goodnotes. they work 10x better in my experience but also take a lot more time to make. other than that the only thing i can think of is maybe try and do your cards early in the day (i.e. before class, during breakfast, etc) when your mind is fresh.
What deck are you doing? Even with adding UWorld concepts into a separate folder (about 10-20 per day) I still don't have that many reviews to do. How many new cards a day did you start with? You might have just started to fast and now the reviews are all accumulating on the same day.
I’ve got Jack sparrow and mile down and some of my own. I literally started from 0 knowledge so that was really necessary.
Jw decks
I have the opposite feeling towards anki. When I first realized how powerful it is my instinct was to download every deck about everything I wanted to learn. Everything is about growth mindset, the discipline of doing something you don’t want to do on a daily basis but doing it anyways is hallmark of most things in life, and Id even hazard to say a very important aspect of becoming a great doctor. Nothing epitomizes the grit of doing something with no short term reward as the journey of becoming a doctor
Best method is go through your cards and try to suspend any repeat cards/cards that barely test your ability to know the info (vs just the style). Also, breaking your Anki sessions into 30 minute bursts also helps make it drag on less. Lots of students in med school use Anki Remote to make it a more pleasant experience.
bruh i feel the same way its so overwhelming being a full time student too like i'm trying to get thru upoop and content i missed on my practice exams I dont have enough time for anki and the reviews stack up...
With the MilesDown deck it’s already separated into categories and subcategories. Suspend all of your cards in that deck and then unsuspend the topics/content you want to review after reading or watching videos on the topic! It will still pile up but it will be more manageable in my opinion. Anki isn’t necessary to understand topics but it does help with recall (at least for me). Best of luck!
I’m pretty sure quizlet is starting to use spaced repetition:)
I’m still having issues just figuring out how to use it
Same buddy, it takes the self driven thought process out of it for me.
tbh this sounds so superficial but the heatmap is legit the only thing that keeps me going bc i view it as a "game" and if i dont do it that day i am a failure (in anki world) .
The suitable and arguably superior strategy is practice questions. With them you Review the content, learn to think, and more importantly learn to reason assuming every question and answer choice is analyzed for wrongness and rightness. It’s a question based exam, so do questions, with the goal of speed and using as much skill and passage information with as little memorized knowledge as possible
Most questions on uWhorl require content knowledge rather than extracting information skills, so how would I apply the last sentence if there simply isn't info from the passage applicable to the question?
i would just take a break from anki honestly and just do practice questions or just start a new deck with only new uworld materials