Well I still have firecracker, because I can't find any other suitable replacement for structured and scheduled content review. I've noticed that over the past 4 months, the cards have not gotten better. I went through about 300 today and in many of them (40 or more), I noticed serious omissions, incomplete or poorly worded explanations, irrelevant/useless/"factoidal" (extremely low yield) information, and/or downright erroneous information. I still think this product is way overpriced for such low quality and poorly organized information. Outright falsehoods are relatively rare, however, very poorly worded and misleading explanations are quite common. Just one of many examples:
From: Imprinting (Prader Willi and Angelman Syndromes)
Uniparental disomy causes about 5% of Angelman syndrome cases. In the case of Angelman syndrome, if the disomic pair is paternally inherited (two copies of the paternal chromosome), they will both be imprinted and no functional maternal copies will be inherited, thus causing Angelman syndrome.
^^ I understand what this card is saying, but the truth is that the person who wrote this probably copied this out of a textbook and tried (very badly) to make it say the same thing the textbook did while putting it in "their own words." Uniparental disomy in general does not necessarily mean that you get 2
entire copies of the chromosome (like the first bolded part suggests). It
could mean that, but it doesn't necessarily mean that. Additionally (and more problematically) the use of the word "imprinted" in this explanation is almost guaranteed to mislead people. If the paternal allele is imprinted, it means it is silenced (and you have monoallelic expression from the maternal allele). And that is what happens normally! Why are they suggesting that this is some abnormal result of getting two copies of the chromosome from the father? In
normal individuals the paternal allele is
always imprinted (therefore it is not expressed). Paternal imprinting of this part of the chromosome (15) doesn't have a damn thing to do with the fact that there are two copies. The reason this is important is because there is ANOTHER way you can inherit Angelman syndrome and that is when the maternal allele is errantly imprinted (and therefore not expressed) - in that case, the paternal allele would be normal, meaning it
would still be imprinted and silenced.
I would guess the person who wrote this part of the section did not understand much of the terminology he was using. Moreover, it makes me think that this sort of thing is common in the authorship of these flashcards. Probably a lot of this material is copied in a very half-assed manner from USMLE review books, but again in a way that makes it seem like its an original explanation.
My other problem is something that may not bother some types of students. That is the fact that FC has 0 consistency in formatting. They have no standardization of terminology, even in individual sections (which is also strong evidence much of this stuff was copied from review books in the manner I previously explained). Am I the only one who gets annoyed when they use "Tc" "cytotoxic T lymphocyte" "killer T cell" "CD8+ T cell" etc... I realize it's the same damn thing and might seem very nit-picky/obsessive-compulsive, but its annoying when there is no consistency. When they use a variety of terms for the same thing it becomes very obvious that the information was copy/pasted and makes the truth of the information rather suspect. Additionally, their use of equations is not in a format that is easily readable. This is annoying for people who want to go through the cards quickly... at least use LaTeX or something (whatever the formatting code you need) to make it look like an actual fraction/equation that is clear. Instead of "Kc(HPc-HPi)-σ(OPc-OPi)" can you please make a little effort to make it more clear/presentable, such as:
Also, the cards are incredibly inconsistent in terms of how much recall they expect. "Name 6 diseases marked by Type 2 Hypersensitivity" --- this yields the equivalent of 3 pages of information detailing each disease and it's highlighted in green. Are you really expecting people to recall all of that information? Obviously not, so cut down on the answers/green highlighted section. For some subjects, FC has a textbook chapter worth of detail, for others it has bullet points, and others are somewhere in the middle. Is this a program for flashcard recall or is it a program where you go to learn about the individual testable subjects in detail? To me it seems like they have a very difficult time deciding which one they want to be. The result is that some subjects have enough info to help you in preclinical science courses, some have just enough for Step I info (but not enough for class studying), and others are succinct enough to be used for simple flashcard recall (which is presumably what a lot of people sign up for). There is a lot of fluff, and as I already explained, there is a lot of poorly written content.
Hopefully FC will read this review and consider some of these suggestions...
