Exam decks

Reviews measure memory over time. Exams measure mastery on demand — an objective, scored, optionally-timed practice test drawn from your cards. An exam is a session over a selection, not a separate file format, and its results are kept completely apart from your FSRS scheduling: taking an exam never changes when a card is next due.

The same card can be both reviewed and exam-tested. Once you’ve set an exam up, see Taking an exam for the run-through and grading.

Enabling exams

Exams are off by default, because turning them on reinterprets some content (a plain to-do list under a heading would otherwise become a question). Enable them one of two ways:

Use the Exams profile. DecksMD ships an “Exams” profile mapped to the #decks/exams tag. Tag a note with it and you’re done:
```
---
tags:
  - decks/exams
---
```
The Exams profile also parses at heading level 2 and sets new-cards-per-day to 0, so exam material doesn’t flood your review queue.
Turn on examEnabled for any profile. If a profile already has reviewed cards, DecksMD warns you how many cards are affected before switching.

The one authoring rule

A heading whose body is a task list becomes a multiple-choice card.

Each top-level task item is an option, and - [x] marks a correct one:

## Which element is a noble gas?

- [ ] Oxygen
- [x] Argon
- [ ] Nitrogen
- [ ] Chlorine

%%Group 18 elements have a full valence shell, which makes them inert.%%

One box checked → single-answer (choose one).
More than one checked → multi-select, graded all-or-nothing.
True/false is just a two-option list: - [x] True / - [ ] False.
The question stem is the heading plus anything above the list (so an image or math block above the options is part of the question).
Explanations come from an Obsidian comment %%…%% or content after a trailing ---; they’re shown on the results screen.

When a task list isn’t a valid question

If a list can’t be a clean question, the card falls back to a normal card and is flagged (never silently dropped) — you’ll see an “invalid exam question” badge in the flashcard manager and a skipped count in the exam setup dialog. Common reasons: no box checked, only one option, task items mixed with plain bullets, nested sub-checkboxes, or an empty option.

Which cards can be examined

An exam is meaningful even with zero multiple-choice cards — your ordinary cards become type-in questions.

Card type	Asked as
Multiple-choice (task list)	Choose one / choose several
Header + paragraph, table	Type-in (short answer)
Cloze	Fill in the blank
Reverse cards	Type-in
Image occlusion, spatial (canvas)	Not supported in exams yet

For fill-in-the-blank, only the target blank is asked — sibling cloze blanks stay hidden so they aren’t spoiled. How typed answers are graded (exact, typo-tolerant, or self-graded) is covered in Taking an exam.