I believe anki can work for me, I just need to learn how to effectively make the flashcards. Almost all of the test questions are directly in the lecture slides but they require application of the material. So, my question to you is, how do you make your flashcards? Do you make them in a question format? If I had a lecture slide with this information (also uploaded):
Papillomaviridae
Human Wart Virus
Human Papillomavirus
dsDNA w/ icosahedral symmetry; Naked
Common skin wart
HPVs Type 1- 4
Secretions or public bath
Epidermodysplasiaverruciformis
Autosomal disease
HPVs Type 5 & 8
Would you make questions on every single bullet point or do you just pick and choose what they might test you on? I'm just worried that I might not have time to make all the cards and review them, much less review previous information with anki. If, IDEALLY, I went over ~12 lectures on Sunday, made flashcards on Monday, I would take 2 tests Thursday and 2 on Friday. That leaves me about 3.5-4 days to study. Is this doable?
In 4 days, I did 1,600 cards (most twice) on ~36 different lectures and got an A. No, I am not a genius. I just studied my goddamn a** off for this last exam and was super organized and dedicated with my reading and flash cards.
As per your question on how I would make this slide a card, this is a tougher one because A) that's a horrible slide because it's just words with no explanation and B) there's more information in that single slide than should be presented. Nevertheless, if something is topic dense and can't realistically be separated into multiple cards, I will put info in the question. And yes, I make my anki cards questions (true or false, open ended, fill in the blank) because studies show memory retention is highest when material is presented in a test fashion versus just being prompted to spit a definition out.
I would make 2 cards along the lines of:
Papillomaviridae are dsDNA viruses with isohedral symmetry. What are 2 examples?
Answer: Human Wart Virus an dHuman Papillomavirus,
What do HPVs 1-4 cause and how is it transmitted? How about HPVs 5 & 8?
Answers: HPVs 1-4 cause common skin warts transmitted via secretions of public bath. HPVs 5 & 8 cause Epidermodysplasiaverruciformis, a heritable autosomal disease
Basically, give yourself half the info in the question and half the info in the answer. That way you're not straining yourself to recall everything on command and you're actively (recalling the answer) and passively (reading the info in the question) learning. In addition, you can also copy and paste whole sentences and put in multiple cloze deletions. That way you make one card, and the same sentence will appear multiple times, asking each time for a different blank for you to fill in. I find this particularly helpful when I don't want to make 4 cards on just one sentence but I need to know all 4 parts of the sentence. Such as: Disease A is caused by a defect of an X-Linked gene that creates Enzyme X, but only manifests clinically in the event Vitamin Y becomes deficient. I could could make 3-4 cards asking what causes Disease A, what it heritability follows, what protein is involved, what deficiency exacerbates it, etc. Or I could simply copy and paste the sentence and put a cloze deletion over the name of the disease, the gene, the enzyme, and/or the vitamin. Boom, I now have 1 card that will test all 4 pieces, either all at once if I choose or each part separately.
Don't use flash cards to force yourself to try and spit out lines cold like you're memorizing a play. Give yourself cues, just as you would on a test, that activate your memory appropriately. That's how humans learn.
