Is anyone else not that fond of flashcarding / anki?

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glee123

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I realize this probably sounds like blasphemy in the medical school world, but does anyone else not really find these that useful? I've tried using them for other exams, and also in different flashcard settings (eg cloze on anki), but always felt like it was something I did because everyone else was and felt very unnatural. Usually ended up abandoning them mid-way through studying. I still did well (> 520 MCAT etc), but am aware that future exams will probably have a ton more info than the ones in the past and that old methods may not work for these. Anyone here do well in med school / step 1 despite not using flashcards?

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So I use the USMLE decks even though i'm not sitting the steps. I find the biggest benefit from having the anki decks is that it's basically all the important information at your finger tips, I don't have to sift through 100+ lecture slides when I know they're going to ask 2 questions from that lecture. For some context I have 6 weeks of lectures total this year and we're given a list of 400 diseases/conditions etc to know as if we were an F1 (1st year resident). It's nearly impossible to meet that expectation with only 6 weeks of lectures so you have to use external resources and people have already done the hardwork of taking whats relevant and made it into the anki decks.

You don't have to use anki in the way everyone here suggests, personally I think it's incredibly nice to have and use as basically a dictionary/bible for example if i'm on placement I can quickly open anki and search for the relevant tags to whatever specialty i'm on and quickly scroll through the cards. Usually i'll ask the attending if there's anything they would like me to focus on over the next few days (aka what cases do you have) and i'll simply Anki those during breakfast and be able to adequately answer any pimping.

I'm the only person in my class AFAIK who uses cards (people know this and ask me what are your cards for say PMR) and I do quite well but the key difference is people seem to spend a lot longer than I do studying for maybe an extra 2-5% which is usually luck based on the 50-50 questions anyway or material we would've had to luckily come across on placement. So I find it just to be overall more effective for basically the reason I put in the first paragraph.

Of course you can score amazing without using Anki several people from my school have got 245+ step 1's without using it. If you ask me the key to any exam no matter the subject is practice questions. Those who do more questions generally score higher, I have no data for this but to me it just seems common sense, which is why people tell you that you have to do Uworld etc and you can't just do the anki decks alone.

P.s I do use the anki decks as intended, I do my cards everyday but seriously it's so useful to type in whatever your attending says you've got that day than to read through 100+ slides. I didn't always use cards either but since I started i've had a much more enjoyable time in med school due to the excess free time it's created.
 
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I hate anki but I still use Zanki religiously. I agree, anki probably wouldn’t have been useful for undergrad material. But for medical school curriculum, poster above makes great points. Zanki in particular is an encyclopedia in its own right. More or over, I found that studying without Zanki made it hard to pay attention to every little detail with equal attention. Anki gets around that.

Edit: but I would like to clarify and answer your question - yeah, I am certain there are many people in my class who have done well without anki.
 
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i have a friend who is doing as well as i am, and doesnt use anki at all. He literally just reads and watches lectures. thats it. He reads the same pages over and over. But his brain is just a bit different - he says that Sketchy does nothing for him, for example, while for me it is the best thing next to sliced bread. So, you dont have to do anki to be successful. Find something that works and stick to it. THere is nothing wrong about not using a resource majority of ppl love (unless it is uworld. hahahha).
I have another friend who didnt use it at all during the first year, but started using it during m1/m2 summer to review year 1 material. This is also a thing.
 
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I hated it. I used q banks instead. It was just similar enough, but I found it easier.
 
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I hated flashcards and zanki just seemed terrible to me. I ended up compromising and making my own cards for topics that require brute force memorization like pharm. I guess you might not need flash cards if you use sketchy, but I didn't like sketchy. I agree that practice questions can be a great substitute for flashcards.

I did use anki (Soze deck) winter of second year to review old material and prep for step 1.

You'll find what works for you, just stick with it once you do. I had moments of panic when it seemed like everyone around my was using zanki and sketchy, but I got honor in every class and killed Step.
 
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I did not particularly like anki before med school. I actually didn’t use it at all the first half of my first module, but it just seemed more efficient so I gave it a try. Zanki and lightyear are just so well put together that I actually like doing the cards now (don’t get me wrong I’m glad when I’m done for the day lol).
 
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