Anki for Medical School: A Complete Setup Guide

Why medical students use Anki

Medical school asks you to hold thousands of facts at once, and most of them are forgotten within weeks unless you revisit them. Anki is a free spaced repetition program: it shows you a card, you try to recall the answer, and it schedules the next review based on how well you remembered. Cards you know well come back rarely. Cards you struggle with come back soon.

The method is backed by decades of research on spacing and retrieval practice. Anki is simply a convenient way to run it at medical school scale.

Choose one main deck

You can make your own cards or use a shared deck. Many US students use a large community deck, such as AnKing, and unsuspend the cards that match each lecture. Others make their own cards from lectures because writing a good card forces you to understand the idea.

Either works. What does not work is several overlapping decks. Pick one main deck, and add your own cards only for material your school tests that the deck does not cover.

Settings that matter

• Scheduler: recent versions of Anki include FSRS, a scheduler that models your memory more accurately than the old default. Turn it on in deck options and let it optimize after you have a few weeks of reviews.
• Desired retention: around 0.90 is a sensible start. Higher values mean many more reviews for a small gain.
• New cards per day: start low, often 20 to 40 during the preclinical years. Every new card creates several future reviews, so your daily review count will grow to many times your new card count.
• Learning steps: keep them short and few. Long sequences of learning steps add time without much benefit when FSRS is on.

Tag cards by lecture

Use tags so you can unsuspend exactly the cards that match today's lecture, and find them again before an exam. A simple scheme is course, then week, then lecture number. When a lecture ends, unsuspend its cards, do them as new cards that evening, and let Anki schedule the rest.

Keep reviews from taking over

The rule that saves most students: do your reviews every day, before new cards and before anything else. Missing a few days creates a backlog that feels impossible, and backlogs are the main reason people quit.

• If reviews pass about two hours a day, pause new cards for a few days until they settle.
• Answer honestly. Pressing Good on a card you half remembered teaches the scheduler the wrong thing.
• Suspend cards that are low-yield for your exams or badly written. Fixing a confusing card once saves dozens of confused reviews.

What Anki does not do

Anki is excellent at keeping facts available. It is weaker at building the understanding that connects them: why a lesion causes a set of findings, or how a drug's mechanism predicts its side effects. Question banks and explaining ideas in your own words fill that gap. Pair daily reviews with regular practice questions so the facts get used, not just remembered.

How to write a good card

If you make your own cards, a few rules prevent most problems:

• One fact per card. A card that asks for five things will be failed for one of them, and you will not know which.
• Use cloze deletions for definitions and lists, but keep each deletion small.
• Add context. "Drug that causes this" is ambiguous. "Antihypertensive that causes a dry cough" is not.
• Use images for anatomy, histology, and pathology. Recognizing a picture is what the exam asks.
• Write the why on the back. A one-line explanation turns a memorized fact into one you can reason with.

A daily routine that lasts

1. Morning: all due reviews, before email or lectures.
2. After each lecture: unsuspend or make that lecture's cards.
3. Evening: do the new cards from today, then stop.

Many students do reviews on their phone in small gaps during the day, such as on the bus or between lectures. The total time is the same, but it feels much lighter.

Frequently asked questions

How many new cards per day should I do in medical school?

It depends on your course load and how fast you review. Many students start with 20 to 40 during the preclinical years and adjust based on how long their daily reviews take.

Should I use FSRS?

For most students, yes. FSRS schedules reviews based on your own memory data, which usually means fewer reviews for the same retention. Let it optimize once you have a few weeks of history.

What if I fall behind?

Pause new cards and do reviews in chunks each day until the backlog clears. Avoid deleting or resetting your progress, which throws away what you already know.

Where plue helps

plue is built for the understanding side. Upload a lecture and work through it with a tutor that asks you to explain each step, gives a smaller hint when you are stuck, and brings ideas back with spaced recall. One way to use both: understand a topic in plue first, then keep the key facts in Anki.