Skip to content

How to Study for Exams with Flashcards (Anki Masterclass)

2024-10-08 · Workshop, masterclass or full course · Ali, David, Clara, Prerak Juthani, Carter, Sanjush, a guest · recording, 3 h 8 min · watch on YouTube

Topic: Learning and studying · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: His own products discussed, Aimed at students, His medical past

Ali's three-hour Anki course, filmed for Skillshare around 2020 and released free in 2024, argues that flashcards with active recall and spaced repetition are the best way to memorise, demonstrates basic, reverse, cloze and image-occlusion cards, his recommended settings and add-ons, and answers when, what and how much to put on flashcards, with interviews of Prerak Juthani and other high-scoring medical students.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Why Ali made the Anki course and why it is now free on YouTube

  • ★★ Ali spent six years at Cambridge medical school and two years as a full-time NHS doctor, and says one app, Anki, got him through all of it. — 00:00:00 · University of Cambridge, NHS, Anki
  • ★★★ Any student who has to memorise things should use Anki, a free, open-source flashcard app, Ali says. — 00:00:00 · Anki
  • ★★★ Ali's Anki course, made a few years earlier for paying Skillshare subscribers, is now free on YouTube. — 00:00:58 · Skillshare classes, Skillshare, Anki
  • ★ Although the Anki course is a few years old, Ali says the Anki app has not changed substantially since. — 00:01:27 · Anki

00:01:41 — Course introduction: the four chapters

00:04:22 — What is a flashcard: active recall, spaced repetition and the forgetting curve

  • ★★★ Flashcards work because they force active recall, which Ali calls the single most powerful study technique: testing yourself strengthens the connections in the brain more than rereading, writing out or highlighting. — 00:05:29 · active recall
  • ★★ Flashcards also suit spaced repetition, which Ali calls the second most effective study technique, designed to combat the forgetting curve. — 00:05:58 · spaced repetition
  • ★★ Nicky Case (quoted): In 1885 Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered the forgetting curve: most of what we learn is forgotten in the first 24 hours, and without recall the remaining memories decay exponentially. — 00:06:28
  • ★★ Each recall makes a memory fade less steeply, so review intervals can lengthen; it is forgetting and then recalling that makes a memory take hold, the brain growing like a muscle only when it works hard. — 00:09:04 · spaced repetition
  • ★★★ Ali discovered Anki late in his first year of medical school; using it properly in his second and third years he got a first and ranked top of the year in third year, while in fourth year, barely using it, he did average. — 00:10:34 · Anki
  • ★★ The years Ali used Anki were his highest-performing years in exams, and he was much less stressed during revision. — 00:11:03 · Anki

00:11:22 — What is Anki, why only Anki and why Ali uses it

  • ★★ Anki's spaced repetition algorithm, modelled on SuperMemo, sets each card's next interval from how easy or hard you rated it. — 00:13:13 · Anki, spaced repetition
  • ★★ Ali thinks of Anki as a second brain: if you make a flashcard and review consistently every day, the fact or concept gets uploaded to your brain, which takes the stress out of studying. — 00:13:42 · Anki, second brain
  • ★★★ Not everything belongs in Anki, Ali says: it is very good for specific examinable facts but not for understanding concepts. — 00:14:11 · Anki
  • ★★ Paper flashcards are a complete waste of time, Ali says, unless writing with colourful pens makes you feel productive. — 00:18:11
  • ★★ Ali uses Anki to memorise specific medical facts, and in his third year used it extensively for his extra psychology degree to memorise paragraphs and paper references for essays. — 00:19:07 · Anki

00:20:06 — Why Anki is amazing: interviewees on studying less and stressing less

  • ★★ a guest: An Anki user Ali interviewed says Anki lets them spend much less time studying with better results and less stress, because they study about 20 minutes every day instead of cramming. — 00:20:35 · Anki
  • ★★ If you can bring yourself to do Anki consistently, Ali says, you probably spend less time working overall and definitely have less stress. (hedged) — 00:20:35 · Anki
  • ★★ a guest: Another interviewee says that with Anki they got through medical school while exercising and calling their parents every day, sleeping as much as they wanted and feeling much less stressed. — 00:20:35 · Anki

00:22:04 — Section 1: installing Anki and the anatomy of Anki

  • ★ In Anki, Ali advises having fewer decks rather than too many, for example one deck for all of medicine. — 00:25:02 · Anki

00:31:03 — The basic flashcard, the reverse flashcard and cloze deletions

  • ★★ Ali makes Anki cards with keyboard shortcuts rather than the mouse: anytime you click, you are being inefficient. — 00:32:48 · Anki, keyboard navigation
  • ★★ When reviewing Anki cards Ali only ever presses "again" or "good" and suggests others do the same; he rarely presses "easy", which can feel like hubris before you forget the card. — 00:34:34 · Anki
  • ★★ A reversed card in Anki tests a two-way association from information entered once, useful where you must recall in both directions, as with cholera and rice-water stools. — 00:39:03 · Anki
  • ★★★ Make flashcards for your future self, Ali says: word each card, or add a hint to a cloze, so that in six months it is obvious what is being asked. — 00:47:01
  • ★★★ Cloze deletions, fill-in-the-blank cards made from sentences, are the single most powerful feature of Anki, Ali says, and he recommends using them extensively. — 00:48:24 · Anki
  • ★★ Ali plans a future class on optimising Anki for intermediate and expert users. — 00:48:53 · Anki, Skillshare classes

00:49:10 — Cloze deletions with David

  • ★★ David says almost all the pre-made decks used for medical school training in the US now use cloze deletions. — 00:49:39

00:53:21 — Editing a flashcard and the image occlusion add-on

  • ★★★ The single biggest mistake people make on discovering flashcards, Ali says, is shoving everything into them and memorising without first understanding. — 00:56:01
  • ★★★ Ali edits his Anki cards as he goes, adding context such as a map, image or explanation to the extra field, so that a card becomes understanding rather than an isolated word. — 00:56:30 · Anki
  • ★★ A flashcard with too much information is a bad card, Ali says: one unknown fact forces you to re-review the whole card, so it should be split into smaller cards. — 00:59:58
  • ★★ The Image Occlusion Enhanced add-on is a very good way to memorise a diagram, map or flow chart; medical students use it a lot for anatomy. — 01:04:55

01:05:25 — David and Clara on image occlusion

01:09:17 — Anki on different platforms and syncing to AnkiWeb

  • ★★ AnkiMobile Flashcards, the official Anki app for iOS, costs about $25 or £23. — 01:09:46 · Anki
  • ★★ Ali calls buying AnkiMobile a no-brainer: anyone who can afford an iPhone can afford it, and it is the only part of Anki that costs money and funds its development. — 01:10:16 · iPhone, Anki
  • ★★ Download Anki only from the official Anki website, Ali advises, because there are many fake copycat Anki apps; on Android the official app, AnkiDroid, is free. — 01:12:42 · Anki

01:18:32 — Section 2: flashcards from a lecture and from a video

  • ★★★ Going through a lecture, Ali makes a flashcard only for an examinable fact that he needs to memorise and cannot rely on understanding for. — 01:19:51 · Anki
  • ★★★ Design your flashcards for the format in which you will be tested, Ali says, and keep their number to a minimum: a list you must reel off together can go on one card. — 01:34:47

01:35:16 — How to memorise a paragraph: Ali's psychology essay deck

  • ★★★ For his third-year psychology exams Ali used Anki to memorise at least 10 references for every essay; he memorised at least 50 essays, and eight of the 12 he had to write came up. — 01:37:44 · Anki

01:39:44 — Improving your flashcards with Prerak

  • ★★★ Prerak Juthani almost always puts in a card's extra field all the prerequisite information he needs to understand the question, so even a basic question carries the surrounding knowledge. — 01:41:49 · Anki
  • ★★ Prerak Juthani asks many questions about one topic from different angles; after going through the cards and sleeping on it, the angles come together like puzzle pieces. — 01:45:06

01:45:54 — The best settings for Anki

  • ★★ Ali's recommended Anki settings for new cards: learning steps of 15 minutes, one day and six days, and a graduating interval of 15 days, instead of the defaults that cause "ease hell". — 01:48:06 · Anki
  • ★ Ali sets Anki to show new cards in random order, so you cannot guess answers from the order cards were added. — 01:49:33 · Anki
  • ★★ Ali sets Anki's maximum reviews per day very high, because too low a limit hamstrings the algorithm. — 01:50:32 · Anki
  • ★★ For lapsed cards Ali recommends a new interval of 70%, a minimum interval of two days, a leech threshold of eight lapses and a leech action of tag only, never suspend. — 01:52:16 · Anki
  • ★★★ Review your flashcards every single day, Ali says, so the algorithm works in your favour and you do not have to think about it. — 01:53:38 · Anki

01:53:39 — Section 3: why and when to use Anki, when to start and what to put on a flashcard

  • ★★ In second year Ali and his housemates Callum and Paul met once or twice a week over a kebab takeaway to "do drugs": bash through their pharmacology Anki flashcards. — 01:54:37 · Paul, Anki
  • ★★ At university Ali kept Anki as the first icon on his iPhone home screen, reducing the friction to doing cards instead of scrolling Instagram. — 01:55:06 · Anki, iPhone, Instagram, friction
  • ★★ Ali is approaching his preparation for the USMLE and will use Anki extensively for it. — 01:55:06 · USMLE, Anki
  • ★★ Ali's friend Angus, who ranked very well in Cambridge medical exams and won prizes, first made Anki cards from his lecture notes, then cut out note-taking and made cards during lectures. — 01:55:35 · Anki
  • ★★ Once good at Anki, you can make flashcards during the lecture itself from screenshots or phone photos; the other way is to take notes and afterwards ask whether you really need a flashcard. — 01:56:04 · Anki
  • ★★★ Start making flashcards as soon as possible, Ali says, except that a first-year student new to a subject should wait a few months, until they know what the exams are like and what they do not know. — 01:57:55
  • ★★ Asked when to start revising for exams, Ali says the best time was two years ago and the second best is now. — 02:00:51

  • ★★★ Exams test not how much you have learned but how well you have prepared for the exam, Ali says, so students have to play the game of exams. — 02:02:40

    “Our exams are not the arena where we test how much we've learned.”

  • ★★ Before deciding what to put on flashcards, scope the subject: Anki is good at the details on the leaves, not at the branches and the tree. — 02:03:09 · scoping the subject, Anki

  • ★★ To know what to put on flashcards, look through past exam papers, or ask someone a year older what came up in their exam. — 02:03:38
  • ★★ In clinical school Ali did online question banks and turned what he got wrong into flashcards, since we learn best from our mistakes. — 02:04:21 · Anki

02:05:10 — How long should a flashcard be, with Prerak and Carter

  • ★★ For his essay exam some of Ali's flashcards held four paragraphs, kept as paragraphs so that their writing style was memorised too. — 02:05:29 · Anki
  • ★★★ How long should a flashcard be: the shorter the better, Ali says; beginners should stick to the minimum information principle, one fact per card, since overloaded cards make you give up. — 02:06:05
  • ★★★ Prerak Juthani says one fact per card works for the USMLE, which tests very specific points, but not for real-life medicine, where attendings ask for whole differentials. — 02:07:56 · USMLE
  • ★★ Carter tries to put no more than four things on a flashcard; for longer lists he makes a mnemonic. — 02:10:53
  • ★★ Carter: When Carter cannot find a mnemonic for a long list, he breaks it into a few categories to remember the whole chunk. — 02:13:30
  • ★★ Applying the minimum information principle strictly to a list, with a cloze for each item, makes the brain pattern-match an item's position on the list instead of the concept. — 02:14:10
  • ★★ Carter: Cramming hundreds of cloze cards for a finals class, Carter found he recognised the words around the blank without understanding the concept. — 02:15:20

02:15:47 — Should I write notes?

  • ★★ Note-taking is useful when you need it to understand something, or when an exam requires you to combine information from many sources, as in English literature essays. — 02:15:47
  • ★★★ Making notes as a medical student is a total waste of time, Ali says: medicine is a standard syllabus already covered by revision sources, so he would use flashcards instead. — 02:17:06
  • ★★ Flashcards become your notes: Ali's friends who used Anki well searched their Anki collection, not Evernote or OneNote, when they met a new condition. — 02:17:35 · Evernote, Anki
  • ★★ Carter takes notes in class to stay awake, but after class the rate-limiting step of his learning is putting things into Anki, and once they are in he sees little point in notes. — 02:19:47 · Anki
  • ★★★ Carter did not take a single note while studying for the MCAT, in which he scored very well: all he did was Anki and practice questions. — 02:20:14 · Anki
  • ★★ A man in Ali's year at Cambridge ranked second in the year with a social life, using Anki from day one and screenshotting lectures straight into it. — 02:21:52 · University of Cambridge, Anki

02:22:58 — How to avoid flashcard overload and how to stay consistent

  • ★★★ To avoid flashcard overload, Ali suggests about 10 to 15 flashcards per lecture, even an hour-long one, since the rest needs understanding rather than memorising. — 02:23:55
  • ★★ When reviews pile up before exams, Ali splits them into sessions through the day: morning, afternoon, evening and in bed. — 02:24:24 · Anki
  • ★★ David: To avoid being overwhelmed, David limited his deck of old-material reviews to about 100 cards a day, roughly one 25-minute Pomodoro. — 02:25:23 · Pomodoro technique, Anki
  • ★★★ David says Anki is for keeping things in memory; understanding, of physiology for example, has to come from other resources. (hedged) — 02:26:31 · Anki
  • ★★ David: The Load Balancer add-on looks at upcoming Anki reviews and spreads them evenly over the following days. — 02:27:28 · Anki
  • ★★★ To be consistent with Anki you have to force yourself at the start, as in marathon training; after a few weeks it becomes a fun game. — 02:29:21 · Anki
  • ★★ Ali uses habit stacking for flashcards, tying them to something he already does: he does Anki on the toilet. — 02:30:42 · Anki
  • ★★ When struggling to start his flashcards, Ali uses the five-minute rule: tell yourself you will do them for just five minutes. — 02:30:42
  • ★★ Doing flashcards with friends in group study sessions is another way to stay consistent with Anki. — 02:31:11 · Anki
  • ★★ Prerak Juthani says you have to make yourself do your Anki reviews, almost algorithmically, or the cards pile up and the deck becomes useless; a day off means double work later. — 02:32:06 · Anki
  • ★★ Ali still struggles to do his flashcards every day. — 02:33:03 · Anki

02:33:22 — Anki versus Quizlet, Google Sheets and Notion; playing the long-term game

  • ★★ Ali recommends Anki over Quizlet for a long degree: Quizlet is prettier, but Anki is faster to enter cards with keyboard shortcuts and more customisable, though any app with active recall and spaced repetition works. — 02:34:49 · Anki, active recall, spaced repetition
  • ★★★ Ali's Google Sheets method is for cramming; with more than about two months until the exam, use Anki, which does the same with a proper spaced repetition algorithm. — 02:36:05 · Google Sheets, Anki, spaced repetition
  • ★★★ To use Anki properly you need a system on the side for the big picture: a spider diagram or mind map as the tree and branches, or Notion, with Anki for the details on the leaves. — 02:38:04 · Notion, Anki
  • ★★ Anki and Notion are not either-or, Ali says, but if he could only choose one he would use Anki, since Notion has no spaced repetition algorithm. — 02:39:10 · Notion, Anki, spaced repetition
  • ★★ If you take notes, add questions to them, as in the Cornell method, so you use active recall; if you do not, put things straight into Anki. — 02:39:10 · Anki, active recall
  • ★★ Anything worthwhile in life, from health and exercise to relationships and studying, benefits from compound returns by playing the long game, Ali says. — 02:40:27

02:41:49 — Section 4: tags and the hierarchical tags add-on

  • ★★ Ali tells Anki beginners to stop the course before the advanced section and spend a few weeks doing Anki every day first. — 02:42:19 · Anki
  • ★★ Ali advises beginners to skip Anki tags: tagging everything adds friction to making flashcards, and friction is the worst force there is. — 02:47:53 · friction, Anki
  • ★★ Downloading pre-made decks is often why people start using Anki and then abandon it, overwhelmed by the number of cards. — 02:50:29 · Anki

02:50:33 — Pre-made decks and their philosophy

  • ★★ Find pre-made decks through an online community for your subject, such as Reddit, and pick the decks everyone uses, which are better fact-checked. — 02:52:12
  • ★★★ Prerak Juthani says pre-made decks work only once you have some understanding, from a Pathoma video or a chapter, before pulling in the relevant cards; importing cards to learn a topic just memorises sentences. — 02:55:42
  • ★★ Prerak Juthani's deck has about 30,000 cards, at least 20,000 of them his own or pre-made cards modified with his own twist. — 02:56:11
  • ★★ Prerak Juthani: Making a card is already a first pass through the material, Prerak Juthani says, whereas a pre-made card may take several passes before you even understand it. — 02:56:42
  • ★★ With a pre-made deck, suspend nearly all its cards and unsuspend them as you study each topic, to avoid flashcard overload. — 02:57:11
  • ★★ Ali says the research shows that making your own flashcards is probably a bit more effective than using pre-made ones. (hedged) — 02:57:41
  • ★★★ Ali thinks the benefit of pre-made decks vastly outweighs their drawbacks: he would rather have 80% effectiveness than spend years making 10,000 cards himself. — 02:58:07
  • ★★ Customise a pre-made deck as you go: using one without adding or editing anything means relying on memorisation rather than understanding, so look up what you do not understand and add it to the card. — 02:58:07

02:59:32 — Add-ons: heatmap, Frozen Fields, Pop-up Wikipedia, Speed Focus Mode

  • ★★ David: With the heatmap add-on David has done Anki reviews every day for over a year, at an average of 319 a day. — 03:00:23 · Anki
  • ★★★ David says medical school is not about who puts in the most hours or cuts their sleep but about who is consistent day after day. — 03:00:23
  • ★★ Ali highly recommends installing the heatmap add-on because it really helps with motivation and consistency. — 03:01:01
  • ★★ Prerak Juthani: The Frozen Fields add-on keeps what you wrote in a field after adding a card, which Prerak Juthani uses to write many questions from one concept. — 03:01:54
  • ★★ Sanjush uses the Pop-up Wikipedia add-on to get a Wikipedia preview of a highlighted word on an Anki card instead of googling it. — 03:04:08 · Anki
  • ★★ Prerak Juthani: With the Speed Focus Mode add-on Prerak Juthani did 2,000 flashcards in three hours while doing Anki for Step 1. — 03:04:58 · Anki
  • ★★ Prerak Juthani finds Speed Focus Mode, which beeps after five seconds and then shows the answer, helps mainly at crunch time. — 03:06:43
  • ★★ Ali does not use Speed Focus Mode, but suggests it for the USMLE or other exams with a massive amount of content. — 03:07:33 · USMLE

03:07:47 — Conclusion

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: active recall · Anki · cloze deletion · spaced repetition

Also: People: Angus (friend, mentioned from 2024) · Callum · Carter · Clara · David · Hermann Ebbinghaus · Nicky Case · Paul · Prerak Juthani · Sanjush

Projects: Skillshare classes

Works: MCAT · MRCP · USMLE

Organizations: Instagram · NHS · Reddit · Skillshare · University of Cambridge · Wikipedia

Concepts: Cornell note-taking · Essay Memorisation Framework · five-minute rule · forgetting curve · friction · habit stacking · keyboard navigation · minimum information principle · Pomodoro technique · scoping the subject · second brain · spider diagram

Products: Anki Heatmap · AnkiDroid · AnkiMobile · AnKing · AnkiWeb · Evernote · Frozen Fields · Google Sheets · Hierarchical Tags · Image Occlusion Enhanced · iPhone · Load Balancer · Microsoft OneNote · Notion · Passmedicine · Pathoma · PDF Expert · Pop-up Wikipedia · Quizlet · Speed Focus Mode · SuperMemo · YouTube AdSense · Zanki

Replies to

← Previous: How to Start a YouTube Channel - Beginners Guide (2026) · Next → VoicePal - a ghostwriter in your pocket 👻