Today, we are going to be talking about the flash card app Anki. This is the bread and butter of nearly every medical school student that I know and if it’s not, they have at least used it once. It is highly effective and great for helping you to study effectively for step exams, module exams, and quizzes all throughout medical school. For me, it is my primary method of learning and I see it as completely VITAL to success. Learn below what it is and why my grades significantly improved with it! If you are trying to improve on your studying and efficiency, check out my other articles on this.
What is Anki?
So what is Anki? Well, its basically a flashcard application. Think of things like quizlet, hand-made flash cards, or a Kahoot. The difference, however, is how it works. This is the main page you’ll see when opening the app:
Have you ever heard of active recall? What about interleaving? Spaced repetition? If you haven’t, check out this article I wrote on study methods. Anki is all of these in one. Seriously, it hits on every research backed high efficiency study method.
Within Anki, you have something called a deck. In this deck are flashcards. One deck can have thousands of cards or as little as 1. These can be decks and cards that you create yourself, or they can be ones you find online. Most of the ones you’ll use will be from online such as Anking.
When you complete a flashcard, Anki will give you the option to select “Again”, “hard”, “Good”, or “Easy”. This is based on how you felt with recalling the info. If it came instantly, you can hit easy. If you didn’t know the answer, click “again”. I personally would only use Again and Good as the others are not really helpful.
Each of these will set the card to be presented to you again at a certain interval time. The first time you see the card, it may be 15 minutes or 1 day if you hit “good”. The next time, it will be 1 hour or 2 days if you hit “good again”. Basically, it spaces it out if you do good. It will repeat the card quickly if you do bad.
It does all the work of normal flashcards AND it spaces them out for you without any additional work on your end. Try to do that yourself or make Quizlet do it and you’ll be there forever!
The cool part about Anki too is that you can change the text colors, time intervals, add/remove pictures, and bold/underline/highlight anything on the cards to further enhance your learning.
The app also has these things called Add-ons which are community created mini-applications within Anki. Some of these help you adjust your retention goals, some will allow you to use a controller, and some even connect you to step studying websites like AMBOSS or Anking. It’s super powerful and I’ll write about them someday. If I haven’t linked those writings yet, feel free to google popular add ons.
The process is pretty simple for add-ons. You can search google for specific ones like “amboss anki add on”, “contanki controller anki add-on”, or “anking ankihub add-on” and they will come up. You’ll want to go to https://ankiweb.net/shared/addons and you can check out all the pertinent ones.
The main page for a given add-on looks like this:
Next, scroll on down to the bottom of the page where it says “Download” in bold. There is a code there which you will use on your Anki app.
Go into Anki, add it in under the add-ons tab, and you’re all set!
This is a brief overview of everything that Anki can do. Now I’m going to go into why use it over others and why it specifically is AMAZING for medical school.
Why is Anki better than flashcards?
The greatest thing about Anki is that you can type your cards out if you are making them and customize however you want to within seconds. Try writing out 500 cards. It would take all day! When you can type 50 words per minute or really any rate, it is likely faster than you can write. The key is efficiency and this app enables it.
Next, these are digital. They can go with you anywhere your laptop, phone, or tablet are. No need to lug around 5000 different paper cards. You can sync all of your progress to every device you have and really, do it anywhere anytime.
The most powerful part in my opinion are the add-ons. There are so many I can’t fully go into them. I will, however, point out that there are some that make your life better. An example is image occlude. This one allows you to take any picture you find online, and put a square of it and almost make a fill in the blank card from any image.
You can even get an add-on called Ankimon which allows you to train and evolve pokemon characters while you anki based on how many cards you do.
My personal favorites are the Ankihub add-on which allows access to Anking decks and does live updates of all the cards. The other favorite is AMBOSS which can make practice questions based on your specific anki cards and directly link you to the AMBOSS information database for every specific card you do.
Why is Anki the best resource for medical school?
Now, why is Anki the greatest tool you have in medical school? The key here is pre-made decks. Don’t waste time making your own flashcards or decks! The likelihood is that a student from a year or two before you has already made one. This will help you ace the in house content that gets quizzed and tested on.
Online, there are hundreds of available decks that medical students have shared. The most prominent is Anking, but there are many others including Zanki, Pepper, UWorld, FirstAid, Sketchy, Pixorize, BoardsandBeyond, NetterBetter, Umich, and more.
These have been tailored to step 1 and USMLE content! They will be your best bet for getting your background information ready.
Anki’s combination of multiple recall methods allows it to be a retainment machine and what you’ll find is that it is extremely hard to get anywhere near the progress using other study methods. Try it, I promise!
What Anki decks do I use for medical school?
I use Anking and two in-house decks made based on my school’s curriculum and quizzes/exams. Anking is used to study for step 1 content and can be done at the same time as your normal studying. It usually runs parallel with what you are learning. You have to search out the relevant topics on Anking first, but then you are set.
The in-house decks were received from other students and just help with passing all the content. You’ll have them at every school and you just need to ask around.
Should I get an Anki remote?
The short answer is YES. The long answer is HUGE YES. This was single handedly the greatest change in my quality of life as a student when I was studying.
Imagine this: Instead of having your laptop in your lap and being hunched over hitting the spacebar and getting wrist irritation, you can sit on your couch with a small remote which does all of it for you!
I was getting wrist discomfort and pain from the positioning of the laptop and also a lot of heat exposure from a hot laptop being on your lap. If it was on the desk, I found my hand posture would lax causing more pain or would cause me to lean forward with bad posture.
With the remote, I am relaxed and can really not have to worry about all of this. It also lets me do cards during meetings or without lecturers really realizing I’m physically using the computer. It’s great!
The one I recommend is the 8bitDO zero2 which you can find on Amazon pretty easily.
Access it here (non-affiliate): 8bitDO anki remote
MCAT STUDYING:
You can also use Anki for your MCAT studying and really any studying during undergraduate. It freed up so much time for me when I was getting my pre-medical studies done. Click here to read more on my experience with the MCAT