I think part of my problem is that I rarely will mark cards a 5, and i only mark "never see again" when it is something really stupid like What is the genotype of a male or something...
I am planning on being more aggressive with my "never see again" but not quitting firecracker entirely, especially because i find it useful for memorizing drug toxicities, microbio, genes , chromosomes etc...
Thoughts?
I am a tiny bit more liberal during the term and now leading up to the step with how I rank questions to avoid that situation. Like you, having done FC for some time now, 200-300 questions per day isn't bad, but doing 400+ while trying to bank more topics on topics on top of that seems a bit crazy.
Personally, I want to keep my load around the 200-300 range so I can do qbanks, while also getting through first aid and learning pharm properly. A big part of your issue is probably how you rank your cards. For me it goes
5 - know everything about that and recited it practically verbatim before showing answer
4 - know it well or would have definitely gotten the question correct on an MCQ (at the beginning of FC when I was young and naive and I flagged a card for which one of the topics makes you memorize a disjointed list of 10 different things... I would actually remember it. Now, if I know I can put 2 and 2 together in a question or understand the mechanism of the pathology I don't waste brain space just remembering a list)
3 - iffy on it. Don't know it well, but maybe have a general grip. I also use 3s for topics that come up in cards I flag that are things I know I will cover later in my prep period. I.e. I'm in pharm now, but flagged some respiratory cards last term that included treatments. Until now, every time a question such as the mechanism for Montelukast, Zafirlukast, etc. came up, I would just read it really quick, hit 3 and move on, knowing I was actually going to learn it later. Now that I covered it in lecture/pharm, those things are simple due to exposure, and I didn't really waste time remembering things for the sake of remembering without understanding first.
2 - Completely forgot, but should have known.
1 - Never used this
I haven't employed the never see again option. Some questions seem flawed and some things are so simple (i.e. last electron acceptor in ETC). However, apparently fixes ARE made and I know there are times in small groups or on questions that I have complete brain farts where something won't come off the tongue that I used to know like the back of my hand. In my mind, when you see something like what is the final electron acceptor in ETC, I wouldn't even care to leave it in, because when I see that it takes literally less than 1 second for me to hit 5 then move on. The time getting spent is on reading details I had forgot and deciding how I should rank it.... and then daydreaming of getting my score back and it saying 300