I agree with this in theory but it is very impractical to make a note card of everything needed to honor an exam. While I like Anki, it is difficult to use pictures with Anki or transfer 15 lectures into cards for an exam. Effective but not efficient.
Also, everything needed to do well on exams isn't equivalent to what you need to know. So how do you separate the minutia from the key concepts?
I look at it like this. Everybody does something. Unless your'e a beast who can just glance his eyes once over some powerpoint slides or whole chapters of Robbins, you must do something else to get it in your head and keep it there. You go to class (or not). You take notes on your powerpoint slides or on a separate piece of paper. Maybe you go home and re-write those notes, or scan those notes a couple of times with your eyes. That all takes times. Lots of it. And that's fine. Learning takes work. But one would hope to be able to keep the fruits of that labor for the future. But that's not what happens with most methods of study in med school. It's more like bulimia. Binge and purge and forget.
I'd argue that whatever it is most people do to study without Anki takes as much time in the short term. Note-taking, sitting in class, making outlines, review sessions, making paper flashcards. It all takes time, and few people are absolved of the need to have to do something more than just show up to class in order to keep all this medical knowledge in our heads. Thus, I'd say that making flashcards on the computer (most cards take me 10 s to make) takes as much time in the short term as anything else one might do. Over the long term, I am certain that this continous, spaced studying methods
saves lots of time because one doesn't need to go back to re-learn or review whole areas of knowledge.
So, overall, I'm happy to pay my time tax up front in card-making and be spared the much larger tax I'd have to pay if I did the typical binge/purge method that I see so many of my really smart classmates do.
I should also say, there are many different ways one could use Anki that have varying degrees of intensity and time investment. It's not all or nothing. Let's say instead of using it to curate every single factoid on all your lectures (what you would need to honor, I guess), you pick the very highest yield ones (maybe 30-50% of the factoids). If you made cards for that and did a continuous review, you'd build yourself a solid foundation of knowledge and save yourself the trouble of re-learning a great deal of what you need to know down the road for step 1 and the wards. It's really up to you and your goals. You could even do less and maybe keep 10-20 super duper high yield factoids/week or something like that. At the end of 2 years, that would not be a trivial amount of information that you've permanently burned onto your brain's hard drive.
Anki is not really made for short term cramming. You can do it if you want, and I'd say it would be as effective as any other method of cramming that people do (maybe even more so because of the active recall). It's for the long term though. So for honoring classes, it wouldn't be much different than anything else people use to meet the suboptimal time constraints for knowledge acquisition that medical school places on us.
Anyway, bottom line (finally
), I don't think card making takes much more time than anything else people do currently in medical school to perform well. If you really add it up and think about what brings people the most value in terms of learning, minute for minute, in the short term, Anki is as good as anything else. For the long term though, which is where SR shines, nothing matches this system, IMHO. All the hard-wrought learning stays with you long after the class is over.
You've already described my concerns. To do very well on exams, you would need probably 400+ cards a day. This isn't manageable over the long run because no one retains 400 cards a day over a 2 year period. 100 cards a day wouldn't cut it to do well.
So, my situation was unique. I go to a school where we do all our preclinical learning in 1 year. So I was learning at 2x speed. In order to keep up with the class AND capture all the information that I wanted to retain for the long term (for Step 1 and just for life) I had to crush that many cards. I admit, it was suboptimal. Not what I would choose to do. And, because most medical students in the country have 2 years instead of 1, I think it's very manageable to use Anki to study for class and beyond.
One more thing I should clear up. Yes, at one point I was doing like 400+ cards a day because I was adding and reviewing an ungodly number/day when my class was moving at a ridiculous pace. But once the semester ended and I stopped adding 400 turns into 200 and then 100 and then even less. I have 10K cards in circulation right now. That's a ridiculous number of factoids to keep in mind. But I only see about 100-200 cards a day for maintenance now. That takes me about an hour to review. In the time I take goofing off on SDN, I could do all my cards
🙂 It's not hard at all because it's just become a part of my routine. On line at the store, walking down the hall to another part of the hospital, while waiting around between rounds. I'm always crushing cards. So that's the magic of SR. The spacing enables you to manage thousands of facts because they get longer and longer spacing. You only see the hard things. Easy cards get pushed back further into the future until you almost never see them at all. I've got cards now with time stamps of 2.5 years because I've answered them right so many times.
Wheew.. that was a lot. I know I sound like a zealot. My apologies. I just get excited about sharing something that I've gotten so much benefit from. As I say to anyone who asks, don't force it. This is what works for me. Give it a try. Tailor it to your goals. If it doesn't help or it become a hindrance, drop it. No worries. At the end of the day, whatever works is what is best, but if you're the kind of person who is distressed by wasted effort and likes systematic, logical study methods, I think Anki is the best thing there is.
Good luck
