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How my friend ranked 1st at Medical School - The Active Recall Framework

2019-11-26 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 22:11 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Learning and studying · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Aimed at students, Evidence-based framing, His medical past, Sponsor segment present

Ali presents the method his friend Osaid used to rank in the top three at Cambridge medical school: never make notes, only write questions from the lecture notes and textbooks, answer them repeatedly without writing down answers, and colour-code the misses; he calls it active recall taken to its logical extreme.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — A friend who ranked in the top three at Cambridge medical school, and the plan of the video

  • ★★ One of Ali's closest friends, Osaid, a medical student at Cambridge University, used a study framework to rank consistently in the top three in medical school, sometimes first in certain subjects. — 00:00:00 · University of Cambridge
  • ★★★ Instead of ever writing notes or summarising lectures and textbooks, Osaid only wrote a ton of questions for himself and went over them again and again when revising. — 00:00:29 · active recall
  • ★★ After three or four repetitions of his questions, Osaid knew pretty much everything in every subject inside out. (hedged) — 00:00:29

00:00:38 — The method in a nutshell: Osaid's documents of questions for physiology and anatomy

  • ★★ For physiology Osaid turned the lecture notes and a textbook into questions only (216 for cardiology, 158 for the kidneys), filling a 37-page Google Doc or Word document. — 00:02:04
  • ★★ To study, Osaid picks a subject such as the upper limb, opens its document and goes through the questions one by one, answering out loud or in his head without writing anything down. — 00:02:32
  • ★★ Ali says that by default students like to highlight and make notes, thinking it useful to summarise lecture notes, a textbook or a revision guide. — 00:03:02

00:03:51 — Why it works: the power of active recall

  • ★ Ali has been preaching active recall for the last two years, and even before he started his channel, in talks and lectures he gave. — 00:03:51 · active recall
  • ★★★ Ali calls active recall the single most efficient study technique ever discovered, supported by a mountain of evidence. — 00:03:51 · active recall
  • ★★★ Active recall means testing yourself: the way to make anything stick is retrieving information from the brain rather than putting it in, so once a topic is understood, ask yourself questions about it. — 00:04:22 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali cites studies in which groups of students taught the same topic reread it, made a mind map, made notes or took a test: tested later, the test group performed significantly better. — 00:05:11 · active recall
  • ★ Ali has recently set up a Discord server, with a study tips chat, where viewers can hang out with him in the evenings. — 00:05:40
  • ★★ Ali recommends the book Make It Stick on how to learn effectively, and his friend Thomas Frank's videos. — 00:05:40 · Make It Stick, Thomas Frank
  • ★★ It baffles Ali that people still ask how to study for exams, since all the evidence around study tips says active recall is the way forward. — 00:06:09 · active recall
  • ★ Ali says it takes on average about seven repetitions of hearing a concept to fully internalise it, which is why he keeps repeating active recall. — 00:06:09 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali thinks the more people hear about active recall, the better human productivity and students' lives would be: less time studying, more time on what matters to them. — 00:06:09 · active recall

00:06:35 — Brilliant (sponsor read)

00:09:01 — How it works: no written answers, colour-coded misses and spaced repetition

  • ★★★ The key of Osaid's method is never writing down the answers: he trusts he can find them in the lecture notes, the textbook or on Google, which saves time though looking them up takes a little. — 00:09:27
  • ★★ Looking an answer up in well-structured lecture notes or a well-written textbook shows which section it is in and where it fits in the bigger picture, so it is learnt in context. — 00:09:57
  • ★★ In Osaid's method the questions he could not answer are coloured red, so a pass short on time covers only those; questions missed again are marked blue for the next pass. — 00:10:55
  • ★★ Cramming works in the short term, but for information to stick long term it must be repeated at spaced intervals to overcome the forgetting curve, so before the exam every question should be gone through. — 00:11:24 · spaced repetition, forgetting curve
  • ★ Ali thinks the forgetting curve was discovered by Ebbinghaus in the 1800s. (hedged) — 00:11:24 · forgetting curve
  • ★★ The questions method cannot be done once and crammed two days before the exam: that would be cramming, not long-term knowledge, while applying spaced repetition to it would be magical. — 00:11:53 · spaced repetition

00:12:13 — Ali's own version in Notion for a supervision on fetal circulation; understanding, effort, compression versus context

  • ★★ Ali has used variants of Osaid's method for a few years but, he says, not as well as Osaid, because he gets lazy. — 00:12:23
  • ★★ Preparing a physiology supervision, Ali went through the heart and circulation lecture notes writing questions for himself in Notion, as in Osaid's method. — 00:12:23 · Supervision, Notion
  • ★★ Ali thinks Notion is really good for writing active recall questions because its toggle feature can hide an answer under each question. — 00:12:52 · Notion, active recall
  • ★★ Ali does not write down the answer to a question he knows, can figure out, or can easily find in the lecture notes, to keep the information in his notes to a minimum. — 00:13:21
  • ★★ Ali says that, as all the evidence shows, summarising information and taking notes with the book open is not a very effective way of studying. — 00:13:54
  • ★★ For answers he does keep, such as the oxygen dissociation curve, Ali screen-grabs parts of the lecture notes with the Mac screenshot shortcut into Notion rather than copying or writing them out. — 00:14:51 · Notion

  • ★★★ What trumps active recall and spaced repetition is understanding the content: there is no point memorising facts without understanding their broad principles, so look up what does not make sense. — 00:15:59 · active recall, spaced repetition

    “the thing that trumps all of these things is to understand the content”

  • ★★★ Learning should not be easy: the more effortful and hard learning feels, the more is actually learnt. — 00:16:28

  • ★★ Ali cites studies in which students who rated a subject harder to learn performed better on the exam and kept the knowledge longer. — 00:16:28
  • ★★ Ali compares studying with the gym: benching 70 kilograms, which is effortful for him, makes muscles grow while 20 kilograms does nothing; difficult study forms connections that sleep then solidifies. — 00:16:58
  • ★★ Reading, highlighting and making notes are popular because they are easy and feel productive, with pretty colours, but they do not use the brain. — 00:17:24
  • ★ Ali says again that he is going to make a video about note-taking. — 00:17:46

  • ★★★ Note-taking is a balance of compression versus context: textbooks and lecture notes are long but give the context, while notes compress it, so his note "RA to LA because fetal lungs don't work" means nothing to a first-year medic. — 00:18:15

    “It's sort of a balance of compression versus context.”

00:19:11 — How Osaid found the method after Ali's 2015 talk on studying for exams

  • ★★★ In 2015, while studying psychology in his third year and reading up on evidence-based study tips, Ali gave a talk at the university about how to study for exams. — 00:19:11 · University of Cambridge, active recall, spaced repetition
  • ★★ If he were actually taking exams, Ali says, he would probably not write down the answers at all but make himself find them in the lecture notes or the textbook. (hedged) — 00:19:11
  • ★★ Planned for about five people in the Islamic Society prayer room, Ali's 2015 study talk went out as a Facebook event that about 20,000 people viewed; a hundred-odd came and the venue moved to a college. (hedged) — 00:19:51 · Facebook
  • ★★ After hearing Ali's 2015 talk, Osaid, who had kept up with his essays and lectures without much other work, spent the two months before the Easter-term exams making questions and answering them. — 00:20:20 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali suspects that if Osaid had used the questions method from day one over the whole year, it would have been even more efficient and taken even less study time. (speculative) — 00:20:20

00:20:49 — Active recall taken to its logical extreme

  • ★★★ Doing very well in exams is all about testing yourself: Osaid's method is active recall taken to its logical extreme, with no time spent writing notes and all of it writing and answering questions. — 00:20:49 · active recall

    “active recall taken to its logical extreme”

00:21:26 — Sign-off and an outtake about slurping coffee

  • ★ Ali asks viewers to leave their questions about the method in the comments and says he will ask Osaid, who will get back to them. — 00:21:26

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: active recall · Osaid

Also: People: Hermann Ebbinghaus · Thomas Frank

Works: Make It Stick

Organizations: Facebook · University of Cambridge

Concepts: forgetting curve · spaced repetition · spider diagram · Supervision

Products: Discord · Google Docs · Microsoft Word · Notion

Also centred on Osaid: Interviewing a Writer // Day in the Life VLOG · Study with Me - Hustle & Chill

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