Quick Anki Advice Needed

[pbrocks15]

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Hey all,

I'm going back through my old Zanki Cards for Step now, as I haven't been doing them throughout the last semester continually and would stop one deck as another organ system started.

I have too many reviews now built up for each organ system and I'm not sure where to go from here? I want to incorporate it into my studying again for the long term but not sure what settings to put.

I have pretty close to 10,000 completed cards that are in the "review" stage.

Is there a way I can start cranking through these at an efficient manner?

Curious what the thoughts are out there on this!

Thanks!

 

[68PGunner]

I have your problem w/ a few blocks myself. Personally, I would reread the FA section one or two times and then crank out the review cards afterward. Make sure to make a list of these blocks and so that you would reread the FA section of this block in 2 weeks and then 4 weeks intervals.

 

[Squlliam_Fancyson]

I'm also studying for boards with zanki. Tbh the best way to do it is churn them out and not spend too much time on a single card. Although I honestly stopped trying to keep up with reviews (I'd end up doing 600+ reviews and 200 news a day). I found that it just become 100% of my studying and had no time for more big-picture review or practice questions. If I were you I'd just go through your weakest decks that your'e unfamiliar with, and use the rest of your review time going over First Aid and practice questions. Obviously you know what's best for you though!

 

[pbrocks15]

I have your problem w/ a few blocks myself. Personally, I would reread the FA section one or two times and then crank out the review cards afterward. Make sure to make a list of these blocks and so that you would reread the FA section of this block in 2 weeks and then 4 weeks intervals.

Are you doing the reviews for that deck again in 2 and 4 week intervals as well?

For example, if you do the entire deck since it was all reviews one day, do you then not have any reviews in that deck for a few weeks?

I Was thinking of doing something similar but I wasn't sure if I should trust my own decision of when the spaced repetition should be.

 

[pbrocks15]

I'm also studying for boards with zanki. Tbh the best way to do it is churn them out and not spend too much time on a single card. Although I honestly stopped trying to keep up with reviews (I'd end up doing 600+ reviews and 200 news a day). I found that it just become 100% of my studying and had no time for more big-picture review or practice questions. If I were you I'd just go through your weakest decks that your'e unfamiliar with, and use the rest of your review time going over First Aid and practice questions. Obviously you know what's best for you though!

I think this is going to be a direction I'm heading in even if I do the method I just mentioned above because even with that method there isn't enough time in the world to really do all the reviews and new cards I have scheduled for every day. I'm hoping to try again to schedule it to be at least an hour a day of my weakest subject but an hour a day doesn't seem to get me far into my reviews.

 

[pbrocks15]

My personal strategy is that I took all of the cards and separated them into decks by system, and then broke it down further by anatomy -> physiology -> embryology -> pathology -> pharmacology, with each corresponding to one day of the week: Monday -> Anatomy, Tuesday-> Physiology, Wednesday -> Embryology, etc, with weekends for catch-up, biostats, genetics, biochem, and micro. I downloaded both Brosencephalon and Zanki and combined the two.

After combining them as above, I looked at the systems we are covering in classes and made an Excel schedule with one system per week to match up as closely to my class schedule as possible. At the current rate I should be done with them by mid-April, hitting some decks twice, giving me time to make it all the way through 1-2 more times during dedicated board study time, taking Step 1 and Level 1 in July.

You combined Zanki and Bros deck? I see what you're saying with the scheduling, I think thats a good idea and I'm going to try to schedule something similar if I can, however, one that fits my schedule and methodology a little better.

 

[AnatomyGrey12]

I would do what 68P said and read the relevant chapter in FA to get a quick refresher and then crank out the reviews. It’s going to take some time out of your day but will probably pay off to reincorporate the spaced repetition of those systems.

 

[Medin2017]

I wonder if this will all pay off? Like how high could you potentially score if you only knew like 90% of zanki and did 1 or 2 passes of Uworld? Tough knowing since it's such a new program

 

[libertyyne]

I wonder if this will all pay off? Like how high could you potentially score if you only knew like 90% of zanki and did 1 or 2 passes of Uworld? Tough knowing since it's such a new program

Student-directed retrieval practice is a predictor of medical licensing examination performance

 

[AnatomyGrey12]

Student-directed retrieval practice is a predictor of medical licensing examination performance

Definitely is also seen anecdotally too, our second years just took a diagnostic practice exam for them to simply see where they were at and there were a handful of people who did exceptionally well, and are still 5 months out for test day. All of the high scorers are the ones who do Zanki or bros every day.

 

[pbrocks15]

Definitely is also seen anecdotally too, our second years just took a diagnostic practice exam for them to simply see where they were at and there were a handful of people who did exceptionally well, and are still 5 months out for test day. All of the high scorers are the ones who do Zanki or bros every day.

I can see this being true. Perhaps i will go with what 68P said and like you suggested, read the chapter and run through the reviews and I'll try to schedule it so that I see those reviews again in 2 weeks. I guess the issue is that I have so many reviews there is no way to really run through them all at once so I'll try to chip at it away slowly.

Trying to incorporate new cards too will be tough.

Do you guys recommend putting all the cards into one deck? Or keep them as separate decks?

 

[AnatomyGrey12]

I can see this being true. Perhaps i will go with what 68P said and like you suggested, read the chapter and run through the reviews and I'll try to schedule it so that I see those reviews again in 2 weeks. I guess the issue is that I have so many reviews there is no way to really run through them all at once so I'll try to chip at it away slowly.

Trying to incorporate new cards too will be tough.

Do you guys recommend putting all the cards into one deck? Or keep them as separate decks?

Honestly what I would do is switch from the Zanki deck and do Bros simply because it’s smaller. You could start doing Bros now as a whole new deck just from the beginning and finish it before dedicated by doing like 100 cards a day. When are you taking your test?

This would allow you to do it all as one deck and then you would also get the intended benefit of the spaced repetition. Then during dedicatedly i would only be doing your reviews every day so you could spend the rest of your time doing whatever your plan is whether that be Qbanks or whatever.

@68PGunner what do you think of this?

 

[libertyyne]

How many average cards do you folks crank out in a day? what if you are learning them?

 

[appalachian_man]

How many average cards do you folks crank out in a day? what if you are learning them?

Using Zanki, crank out like 150-250 cards a day with most of those being learning cards because I just started. Typical routine is watch B&B, go through lecture slides, then do related Zanki cards. If I have time at night or whenever I read through the FA/Pathoma section and annotate what I learned from the day.

Not sure if that's the most efficient use of time but it seems to be working for me. Much better than trying to do all my primary learning from lecture slides.

 

[AnatomyGrey12]

How many average cards do you folks crank out in a day? what if you are learning them?

I’ll do 100 new ones a day. The reviews don’t take that long if I stay up on them and the rest of my study is fairly similar to what the above poster does. Lots of BB, Pathoma, sketchy, and then I review the lecture PPs. I’ll finish the Zanki section for the current system we’re in about a week before our final and then I’ll spend that week simply reviewing class PPs for the prof details and crank out all of the questions for that topic in a Q bank.

We just started systems so this is different than what I did for basic science. I’ll see how it turns out.

 

[pbrocks15]

Honestly what I would do is switch from the Zanki deck and do Bros simply because it’s smaller. You could start doing Bros now as a whole new deck just from the beginning and finish it before dedicated by doing like 100 cards a day. When are you taking your test?

This would allow you to do it all as one deck and then you would also get the intended benefit of the spaced repetition. Then during dedicatedly i would only be doing your reviews every day so you could spend the rest of your time doing whatever your plan is whether that be Qbanks or whatever.

@68PGunner what do you think of this?

The only reason I'm not a fan of this is because i really like zanki and I feel like it's more encompassing. The physiology in Zanki and overall quality i feel like is better.

If I started now with it from scratch, I would have like 200 new a day and like 1000 reviews a day. It just seems like it might also be too much, I'm not sure which is better honestly.

 

[Nucleophile1]

Definitely is also seen anecdotally too, our second years just took a diagnostic practice exam for them to simply see where they were at and there were a handful of people who did exceptionally well, and are still 5 months out for test day. All of the high scorers are the ones who do Zanki or bros every day.

When would you recommend starting Zanki or Bros? I am an M1 and we are going to start organ systems soon.

 

[AnatomyGrey12]

When would you recommend starting Zanki or Bros? I am an M1 and we are going to start organ systems soon.

This is just what I’m doing and I won’t even know if it’s effective until we finish the current system so take it as you will. So first I calculated how many cards I would have to do a day for me to get through all of that system’s cards a week before our final. Then I created a separate deck and pulled all the cards related to that system over to the new deck. Every day I do my calculated amount of new cards and all the reviews. When we start the next system I’m going to pull over the next system’s cards to my deck and then do the same thing and just do that as we go through systems. That way I am still doing the reviews of the prior system on top of my new sustem’s cards theoretically keeping everything fresh and pounding it into the LTM. I plan on adding in all the cards that Zanki has that don’t align with our systems over the summer and get them done. The idea is to have the whole deck in review about 4 months before my test date (also a first year so we have a while) so then I can just do the reviews and spend the bulk of my time doing Q banks and honing in on the details I’m weaker on.

 

[pbrocks15]

This is just what I’m doing and I won’t even know if it’s effective until we finish the current system so take it as you will. So first I calculated how many cards I would have to do a day for me to get through all of that system’s cards a week before our final. Then I created a separate deck and pulled all the cards related to that system over to the new deck. Every day I do my calculated amount of new cards and all the reviews. When we start the next system I’m going to pull over the next system’s cards to my deck and then do the same thing and just do that as we go through systems. That way I am still doing the reviews of the prior system on top of my new sustem’s cards theoretically keeping everything fresh and pounding it into the LTM. I plan on adding in all the cards that Zanki has that don’t align with our systems over the summer and get them done. The idea is to have the whole deck in review about 4 months before my test date (also a first year so we have a while) so then I can just do the reviews and spend the bulk of my time doing Q banks and honing in on the details I’m weaker on.

Only issue I had with this is that you're not going to hit the reviews for your system that your currently in at a rate or pace that's efficient for learning for that block. That was my experience, I tried something very similar. I'm interested to hear if it works for you over the next few blocks, would be interesting to see! That's how theoretically it should be done though.

 

[AnatomyGrey12]

Only issue I had with this is that you're not going to hit the reviews for your system that your currently in at a rate or pace that's efficient for learning for that block. That was my experience, I tried something very similar. I'm interested to hear if it works for you over the next few blocks, would be interesting to see! That's how theoretically it should be done though.

Yeah we’ll see. I’m trying to a least stick it out this semester and then re-evaluate

 

[Medin2017]

Student-directed retrieval practice is a predictor of medical licensing examination performance

Thank you! Very reassuring

 

[libertyyne]

Thank you! Very reassuring

It shouldn't be that reassuring. People in the study made their own cards. And people who used premade cards like firecracker didn't have a correlation.