Spaced repetition for finals: flashcards that come from your slides

Reading the same deck three times feels productive, but most of it is gone a week later. Spaced repetition works the other way round: you test yourself on a fact just before you would forget it, and each time you remember it, the next review moves further away.

Cards from your own slides

PreceptorMD writes flashcards from your decks, and each card shows the deck and slide it came from. You can make cards from a whole deck, from a topic across all your slides, or from a structure in the 3D atlas.

How reviews are scheduled

After you flip a card, rate how well you knew it: Again, Hard, Good or Easy. PreceptorMD uses FSRS, a modern scheduling method, to work out when you should see that card next. Cards you find hard come back sooner; cards you know well space out to days, then weeks.

Ten or fifteen minutes a day of due cards does more than a long session once a week.

Every miss becomes a card

When you get an exam-style question wrong, PreceptorMD can turn the point you missed into a flashcard, tied to the same slide. Your mistakes become your revision list without you having to write anything down.

The weakness map shows which topics you miss most, and the study plan puts those topics first.

Offline on the ward

Flashcard reviews work without data. Open your due cards before you lose signal, review them on the ward or on the trotro, and your ratings sync the next time you are online.

Taking cards to Anki

If you already use Anki, export any set of cards as a CSV file and import it there. The cards keep their slide references.

A simple routine for the last eight weeks

1. Upload this week's lectures as soon as you get them.
2. Do your due cards every day, before anything else.
3. Do one short set of exam-style questions on the week's topics, and let the misses become cards.
4. Once a week, look at the weakness map and follow the study plan for the weakest topic.