Flashcards for exam preparation

Spaced repetition optimises for remembering things indefinitely. An exam asks you to know a defined body of material on one specific morning. Those are not the same objective, and the gap between them is where most revision plans fall apart.

Work backwards from the date

The single most useful number is the future-due forecast in statistics: how many cards fall due on each of the coming days and weeks. A revision plan that ignores it tends to discover in the final fortnight that everything introduced in month one has come due at once.

Alongside it, retention rate tells you what proportion of cards you actually recalled, measured against your target. That is the number that distinguishes revising from re-reading. The heatmap and interval distribution fill in the rest: whether you have been consistent, and whether your material has actually matured or is all still on short intervals.

Set the pace deliberately

Two controls, both per profile, which means per tag — so an examined subject can be run differently from everything else:

Daily new and review limits. Introducing 100 new cards the week before an exam guarantees a wall of reviews at the worst possible moment. Capping new cards while leaving reviews uncapped is usually the right shape as a deadline approaches. A global daily study cap sits on top.

Retention target. Raising the examined subject from 90% to 95% buys fewer lapses at the cost of more daily reviews. It is a real trade rather than a quality setting, and the time to make it is early enough that the additional reviews spread out.

Practice that costs you nothing

The reason people avoid drilling before an exam is a reasonable fear of wrecking their intervals. DecksMD separates the two outright.

Exam decks run a graded, one-sitting session over any deck, in any order, with an optional time limit and pass score and a full breakdown at the end. And they do not touch FSRS scheduling — nothing you do in an exam writes review state.

Authoring is a single rule: a markdown task list under a heading becomes a multiple-choice question, with ticked items as the correct answers.

## Which of these are required for negligence?

- [x] A duty of care
- [x] Breach of that duty
- [ ] A contractual relationship
- [x] Causation

Multi-select works automatically. Heading and table cards are asked as type-in; cloze cards appear as blanks. Grading is exact, typo-tolerant or self-graded — pick self-graded for anything answered in prose, because an exact-match grader marking your paragraph is worse than useless.

Cram is the lighter version: an unlimited drill through one deck, resumable, equally scheduling-neutral. It is what you want the night before.

Revise a topic, not a file

Filter decks build a live deck from a tag query — every card tagged #paper2, wherever it lives. Because tags work per card as well as per file, one note can feed several. Cards keep their own scheduling; the deck is a view.

The flashcard manager is the other half: search and sort every card you own, bulk-edit, and turn a selection into a custom deck. It is also where you find the cards that keep defeating you, so a leech becomes something you rewrite rather than something you keep failing.

The week before

• Stop introducing new cards in the examined subject; let reviews drain.
• Sit an exam deck under a time limit. It is graded and it costs your scheduling nothing.
• Use the results breakdown to find weak areas, then cram those specific decks.
• Rewrite anything that has become a leech. A card you have failed six times is usually a badly written card, not a memory failure — splitting it into atomic cards fixes more than repetition will.

After it is over

Nothing is thrown away. The material stays in your notes and the cards stay scheduled, so the subject you were examined on in June is still there — on long intervals, costing a few minutes a week — when you need it in a viva, a later module, or professional practice. That is the part cramming cannot give you.

More guides

• Flashcards for medical school
• Flashcards for engineering students
• Flashcards for law students
• Flashcards for language learning

Or start with what FSRS actually is, or how DecksMD compares with Anki and the Spaced Repetition plugin.