Short answer: Anki is genuinely good, and most students still waste time with it. The wins come from lots of small, ugly cards reviewed a little every day. The waste comes from making beautiful decks, letting reviews pile up, and putting things on cards that should have been practice questions.
Why it works
The spacing effect is one of the most robust findings in learning research: the same total study time produces far more durable memory when spread across sessions rather than crammed (Cepeda et al., 2006). Anki automates that spacing, showing each card roughly when you are about to forget it. That is the whole trick, and it is a good one.
The four ways students break it
1. Making the deck instead of using it
Beautiful cards with images, colour coding and perfect formatting feel like studying. They are not. Keep cards ugly and fast. One fact, one card, move on. The value is in the reviews, not the making.
2. Letting the queue explode
Miss a week and you come back to eight hundred due cards, which is demoralising enough that most people quit. Ten focused minutes daily genuinely beats a three-hour catch-up session, both for retention and for whether you keep doing it at all.
3. Carding the wrong things
Anki is for atomic recall: a definition, an enzyme, a hormone, a value. It is bad at teaching you to apply a concept to an unfamiliar scenario, which is what the harder exam questions want. If a card has three sentences on the back, it should probably have been a practice question instead.
4. Downloading a huge shared deck
Tempting, and usually a mistake. Someone else's deck is built for someone else's course, so you inherit thousands of cards on things Otago does not assess. Making your own cards is itself a learning step.
What to card in HSFY
- Good candidates: anatomy terms, hormone functions, enzyme roles, pathway steps, definitions in POPH192, formulas and their conditions in PHSI191.
- Bad candidates: whole mechanisms, anything needing multi-step reasoning, "which statistical test fits this scenario". Practise those as questions.
How it fits with everything else
Think of it as two engines. Anki builds the memory layer, the raw facts you should not have to think about. Practice questions build the application layer, using those facts under exam conditions. Neither replaces the other, and students who only do one usually plateau.
Cutline lets you export to Anki, so you can pull material straight into your deck rather than retyping it, and keep the practice and the memory layers in one workflow. Start free here.
References
- Cepeda, N. J., et al. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380.
