How to Use Anki in Medical School (The Way That Actually Works)

Most advice about Anki in medical school falls into one of two camps: either "make a card for everything" (which produces a 10,000-card deck you'll stop reviewing by week three) or "just use someone else's pre-made deck" (which teaches you to recognize answers, not recall them). Neither of these is actually what works.

Here's what I learned after two years of pre-clinical medical school: Anki is the terminal step in a pipeline, not the entry point. The pipeline matters as much as the cards.

The Pipeline First

My actual workflow looked like this:

1. Listen to the lecture — minimal notes, active listening, building a mental model
2. Rewrite pass — go through the material in your own words, identify gaps
3. Fill the gaps — supplementary resources (NinjaNerd, Medschool Bootcamp, whatever clicks)
4. Make cards — only after the first three steps. By this point, you actually understand what you're making a card about.

If you make cards during the lecture, you're converting text to text. If you make them after you've processed the material twice, you're converting understanding to a testable format. The difference in card quality is dramatic.

What Goes on a Card

The rule I follow: one concept per card, in your own words. Not copied from a slide. Not paraphrased from a textbook. Your language — the way your brain already thinks about it.

Beyond standard recall cards, I used two formats heavily:

• Cloze deletions for buzzword-to-answer connections. Quick to make, fast to review, great for high-yield term mapping.
• Missed-question cards — after every wrong answer on a practice block, a card that explains not just the right answer but the specific reasoning error that caused the wrong one. These are the most valuable cards in any deck.

Deck Size: Less Is More

A deck of 200 excellent cards will serve you better than a deck of 800 mediocre ones. Not because the larger deck lacks information — it doesn't — but because you'll actually review the smaller one every day. Consistency with a lean deck beats sporadic reviews of a bloated one every time.

Make It Not Feel Like Studying

This sounds trivial. It's not. The thing that determines whether you actually do Anki at 11 PM after a twelve-hour study day isn't motivation — it's friction. I used a PlayStation 5 DualSense controller paired to my MacBook via Bluetooth to review cards. One button reveals the answer; face buttons are mapped to the rating options. It sounds ridiculous. It works.

The cards are the same. The content is the same. The input method changed how it felt, and how it felt determined whether I'd actually do it.