A guide for students · All year
Spaced repetition at university
Spaced repetition suits a degree well: put each week’s facts, definitions and steps on small flashcards as the term goes, do the reviews that are due every day, and let a scheduler such as FSRS decide the gaps. Add new cards only as fast as your daily reviews can carry, and mix in practice questions, because flashcards keep the facts in your head but exams ask you to use them.
Why it suits a degree
A degree module covers more than an A level topic in less time, and there are several running at once, so the material you learnt in week two is easily gone by the exam. A large analysis of spacing experiments by Cepeda and colleagues found that the best gap between reviews grows with how long you need to remember something, and a flashcard scheduler applies that to every card separately, so a card you know well waits months and a card you keep forgetting comes back within days.
It also works better than it feels. In flashcard experiments by Kornell, studying one large stack, which spaces each card out, beat studying four small stacks one after another, and spacing beat cramming the day before the test. Spacing did better for 90% of the participants, yet after the first session 72% of them believed the massed version had worked better, which is a good reason to trust the schedule over the feeling.
What to put on the cards
The advice that has lasted longest comes from Piotr Wozniak’s rules for formulating knowledge, written for his SuperMemo program in 1999. Understand something before you make a card of it, build the overall picture first, and keep each card to the minimum: one fact, one short answer. Fill-in-the-gap cards made from a sentence in your notes are quick to write. Lists and sets are hard to remember as a single card, so break them into several cards, each asking for one item in context.
Good material from a degree includes definitions, the steps of a mechanism or a derivation, the conditions for a theorem, a case and the principle it set, a key study and what it found, and the vocabulary of a field. Whole paragraphs, essays and long proofs do not work as cards; for those, make cards for the parts you keep forgetting and practise the whole thing as a question. Writing the cards from your own notes in the same week as the lecture keeps them in your words and stops a backlog building up before the exams.
How much time it takes
New cards are what create work later, because each one comes back several times in its first weeks. The Anki manual gives a rule of thumb: if you learn 20 new cards a day, expect roughly 200 reviews a day once the deck is going. So pick a number of new cards a day from the time you can spend every day, not from how much there is to learn, and lower it in a heavy week rather than skipping reviews.
FSRS, the newer scheduler Anki now offers, schedules each card for when your chance of remembering it drops to a level you choose, called desired retention. The manual gives 90% as the default and a good balance, and warns that above 90% the workload rises very quickly. It also suggests optimising the scheduler’s parameters from your own review history about once a month. The habit that matters most is doing the due reviews every day, since a week of overdue reviews is cramming again.
Mixing cards with practice questions
Flashcards keep the facts available, but a degree exam asks you to apply them, explain them and argue with them, and that needs questions. The review by Dunlosky and colleagues found practice testing works across many kinds of test, not only recall of facts, so space the questions out too: problem sheets from earlier weeks, a past exam question on a topic you covered a month ago, an essay plan written from memory.
Mixing different kinds of problem in one session also helps, because interleaving teaches you to tell similar problems apart, which is what the exam asks when it does not say which method a question needs. A daily ten or twenty minutes of cards and a few sessions of questions each week, both spread over the term, is a workable pattern for most modules. cookie’s flashcards schedule pasted cards, a Quizlet export or an Anki deck in the same way.
Where to check
- Cepeda and others (2006), Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks
- Kornell (2009), Optimising learning using flashcards: spacing is more effective than cramming
- Anki manual: deck options, new cards and FSRS
- Wozniak (1999), Effective learning: twenty rules of formulating knowledge
- Dunlosky and others (2013), Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques
- Rohrer (2012), Interleaving helps students distinguish among similar concepts
Checked against these on . The rules change from year to year, so the pages above are the ones to trust if anything here disagrees with them.
Common questions
How many new flashcards should I add each day?
As many as your daily reviews can carry. The Anki manual’s rule of thumb is that 20 new cards a day leads to roughly 200 reviews a day once the deck is going, so work back from the time you can spend each day.
What desired retention should I set in FSRS?
The Anki manual gives 90% as the default and a good balance of remembering and workload. It warns that above 90% the number of reviews rises very quickly, so raise it only if you have time to spare.
Should I use a shared deck or make my own cards?
A shared deck can save time where your course follows a standard syllabus, but check it matches what your lectures cover and suspend what it adds. Cards written from your own notes are in your words and follow your modules, which makes them easier to remember.
What if I fall behind on my reviews?
Stop adding new cards until the backlog is gone, and clear the overdue reviews over a few days rather than all at once. Then set a lower number of new cards a day that you can keep up with every day.
Are flashcards enough to revise for a degree?
No. They keep facts and definitions in your head, but degree exams ask you to apply and explain them. Use cards alongside past exam questions and problem sheets, spaced out over the term in the same way.