Effective Spaced Repetition

Re:Effective Spaced Repetition by atahanacar on Monday April 10, 2023 @03:26PM (#35516317)

Going through a whole deck in one sitting is not the correct way to do it. Your brain gets tired and it needs some rest. The way I did it is use the tags to filter topics every day by lectures in my school. Once I complete the day and still have energy left, I'd move on the the next day and continue until I'm tired. I'd finish around 3 times quicker than the pace of school lectures.

One thing with Anki or any other SRS is that it only works if you do it on time. Doing a few cards for a short amount of time and claiming "Anki doesn't work" is just nonsense.

>Anki might be useful for a few light cards every day but it's useless for the long study sessions demanded by med school.

This could be one of the most controversial statements for med students. Every classmate I talk to either uses Anki or a local commercial SRS specifically made for my country's med school curriculum/exams. And it's not just my friends or my country either, r/medicalschool shows the same tendencies.

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Re:Effective Spaced Repetition by cpburns2009 on Monday April 10, 2023 @05:04PM (#35517399)

I think the problem is Anki is advertized as digital flashcards when it's actually SRS. When you can't use it as digital flashcards, people without copious time to work around its peculiarities will consider it useless.

> Once I complete the day and still have energy left, I'd move on the the next day and continue until I'm tired.

How can you finish a day without finishing its material? That's what ultimately frustrated my wife. Anki prevented her from getting through all of the material in the med school decks she got from a classmate. She stoped trying it after a few days because her time was better spent studying directly.

> Every classmate I talk to either uses Anki or a local commercial SRS specifically made for my country's med school curriculum/exams.

My experience with a US med school was some students used Anki. Most didn't.

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Re:Effective Spaced Repetition by atahanacar on Monday April 10, 2023 @06:40PM (#35518256)

>How can you finish a day without finishing its material? That's what ultimately frustrated my wife.

Well, I don't think anyone can actually finish a day's worth of material in just one day. What Anki does is it helps you plan out how to spread your material so you use your time efficiently. A day's material is spread to multiple days, but you "learn" (the terminology for the card being due in more than a day) all of them the same day, to repeat it the next day and so on, with delays depending on your recall performance. If you make a mistake, your delay for that card is reduced.

>Anki prevented her from getting through all of the material in the med school decks she got from a classmate.

Ah, that might be a problem. If those decks were poorly made, and they probably were if they aren't something like Anking or copied straight from a source like Pathoma, they might even make one want to quit medical school. Ask me how I know.

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